Oh, what company good poets are!

Poetry is not a silent art. The poem must perform, unaided, in its reader's head. Educated readers give themselves a good performance. Educated listeners…

— Christopher Logue

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

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

— Nicholson Baker

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

— Randall Jarrell

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

— Kenneth Koch

And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.

— Elizabeth Bishop

Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor,…

— Paul Engle

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their…

— Umberto Eco

Good poets borrow, great poets steal

— T. S. Eliot

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.

— Helen Vendler

I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a…

— Carolyn Kizer

One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate…

— Anonymous

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their…

— Clifton Fadiman

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

Bad poets imitate, good poets steal.

— T. S. Eliot