Poet Quotes · Page 2

My task as poet is close to me.

— Tanikella Bharani

“Envy won't make you a better poet.”

— Katerina Stoykova Klemer

Poets are band leaders who have failed.

— Ayi Kwei Armah

Honor is the greatest poet.

— Dante Alighieri

A poet must sing for his own people.

— Edmund Clarence Stedman

I'd better be a poet Or lay down dead.

— Jack Kerouac

Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs.

— Karl Shapiro

Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.

— Clarence Darrow

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,

— T. S. Eliot

I am the scroll of the poet behind which samurai swords are being sharpened.

— Lester Cole

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

— Yehuda Amichai

In America they make too much fuss of poets; in London they make too little.

— Caitlin Thomas

What made me a comedian was that I wasn't really a songwriter, I was more of a poet.

— Tommy Chong

“I’m going to become a beat poet and a lesbian!”

— Benjamin R. Smith

I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I'm up against.

— Leonard Cohen

“So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay.”

— John Green

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.

— Erica Jong

“There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden. Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable.”

— Toba Beta

What is a modern poet's fate? / To write his thoughts upon a slate; / The critic spits on what is done,…

— Thomas Hood

While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.

— Alexander Pope

“Poetry excites innate emotions and perceptions that let you create a new world where you have never visited and no one else…

— Debasish Mridha

“ink marks the page/where you execute your will like a doe announcing an/ox-stern mate with a single, bleary blink.”

— Melissa Lee-Houghton

The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen…

— Anonymous

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I…

— William H. Gass

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self…

— Susan Sontag

A poet is an unhappy creature whose heart is tortured by deepest suffering but whose lips are so formed that when his…

— Soren Kierkegaard

Happy the poet who with ease can steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe. [Lat., Heureux qui, dans ses vers,…

— Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

Poetry and philosophy are, according to how you take them, different spheres, different forms, or factors of religion. Try to really combine…

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson,…

— Patti Smith

Gabriel Levin's book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East. What's astonishing and refreshing is his…

— Adam Zagajewski

But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines,…

— Henry David Thoreau

Don't send a poet to London.

— Heinrich Heine

A poet over 30 is pathetic

— H. L. Mencken

“Once a poet, always a poet.”

— Catherine McKenzie

I think being a poet, period, is isolating.

— Victoria Chang

There are poets and there are grownups.

— Jean Cocteau

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

— Wallace Stevens

The poet is the complete lover of mankind.

— Edith Sitwell

The poet is a madman lost in adventure.

— Paul Verlaine