Poet Quotes · Page 36

A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity

— James Russell Lowell

All great poets have been men of great knowledge.

— William C. Bryant

“I walk with a dual longing for life and for death.”

— Melissa Lee-Houghton

Latino poets, are really having a significant impact on American poetics today.

— Kwame Dawes

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

— Helen Vendler

And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.

— Ray Bradbury

The poet is blithe and cheery ever, and as well as nature.

— Henry David Thoreau

The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.

— Heinrich Heine

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

— Robert Morgan

Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they…

— K.J. Parker

Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.

— William Saroyan

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

— Umberto Eco

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to…

— Clive James

Jim Jarmusch: Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

— Jim Jarmusch

There is a long-standing tradition in America of scoffing at poets, especially if they show any interest in politics.

— Eugene McCarthy

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when…

— Leslie Fiedler

Maria Edgeworth grumbled against vandals who ruined immortal works by quoting the life out of them. "How far our literature may in…

— Willis Regier

“You have never been as beautiful as you will be through our eyes. You will have never known that the hard edge…

— Jeanette LeBlanc

In the year of our Lord 1314. Patriots of Scotland, starving and outnumbered, charged the fields of Bannockburn. They fought like warrior…

— William Wallace

In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet…There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s…

— Madeleine L'Engle

There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature,…

— Anonymous

Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of…

— Randall Jarrell

I never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was…

— Ai Weiwei

Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and…

— David Biespiel

How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they

— John Keats

Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

— Rick Yancey

But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

— Robin Williams

“a poet can always find something good to write about.”

— Colleen Houck

Around the world, the generals are being ousted, and the poets are taking charge.

— Warren G. Bennis

Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.

— William Ellery Channing

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

— Douglas Dunn

We're football people, not poets, but obviously I'm disappointed with the result.

— Mick McCarthy

“Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.”

— Gustave Flaubert

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

— Umberto Eco

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

— Ralph Ellison

A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.

— Criss Jami

“Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance like breath.”

— Shah Asad Rizvi

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

— Kenneth Koch

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

— Elizabeth Janeway

The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.

— Edward Hirsch