A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at…

“A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop…

— Salman Rushdie

“He never described himself as a poet or his work as poetry. The fact that the lines do not come to the edge of…

— Leonard Cohen

I say sometimes that I'm a poet but I work in the novel form. That's what I do. That's what makes sense to me.…

— Douglas A. Martin

I do think that given my background as a poet, and also I work in a different field, you're sort of neither here nor…

— Victoria Chang

The poet must work with brush and paper,but this is not what makes the poem. A man does not go in search of a…

— Yang Wanli

It is part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.

— Edith Sitwell

A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work…

— Seamus Heaney

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

— Paul Valery

“Poet's Work" Grandfather advised me: Learn a trade I learned to sit at desk and condense No layoffs from this condensery”

— Lorine Niedecker

If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost…

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages. It's still in the fifteenth century or…

— Salman Rushdie

Any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular, can be introduced into any political argument at any time, but I argue that people who do this…

— John Rawls

Lutherans, whose arguments and mistakes will not be difficult to contest or discover, do not want to attribute any value to works, and they…

— Michael Servetus

Preaching to the choir actually arms the choir with arguments and elevates the choir's discourse. There's a reason the right does it and does…

— Dan Savage

A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.

— Rowan Williams