a poet never feels useful.

A good poet feels what his community feels. Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts.

— Gil Scott-Heron

A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire…

— W. H. Auden

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

— W. H. Auden

“For love is greater than any wind of words. And man, leaning at his window under the stars, is once again responsible for the…

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I know perfectly well that only in happy instants am I lucky enough to lose myself in my work. The painter-poet feels that his…

— Carlo Carra

“The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or…

— Vladimir Nabokov

To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With…

— Maxine Kumin

Beauty is an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the…

— Charlie Chaplin

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

— Vladimir Nabokov

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

— May Sarton

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