A scholar is someone who sticks to things. A poet is…

Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes…

— John Dryden

Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.

— Edmond Jabes

The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.

— Henry David Thoreau

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is…

— Northrop Frye

I tend to integrate poet and scholar is by ironizing the scholarship. My hope is to disturb that space between the two so they…

— Gregory Pardlo

Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on,…

— A. E. Housman

“A poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, then raise it to nourish your beautiful parched, holy mouth.”

— Hafiz

Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our…

— Richard M. Weaver

“The poet is just like the fabled hunter who naps beside a tree, waiting for hares to break their skulls by running headlong into…

— Gu Cheng

The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is…

— Norman Cousins

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early…

— Umberto Eco

“Without pain, poetry is not possible.”

— seerat

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the…

— Washington Irving

A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the…

— Samuel R. Delany

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

— Carl Rakosi