The business of the poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not…

“Be not too hasty," said Imlac, "to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men.”

— Samuel Johnson

The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances.

— Samuel Johnson

“Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.”

— Philip Larkin

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry,…

— T. S. Eliot

I once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from -…

— Eavan Boland

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

— Virginia Woolf

“Indeed, there is pain when spring buds burst..." Wasn't there a Swedish poet who had said something like that? Or was she Finnish?”

— Jostein Gaarder

This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost…

— Clive James

“When in my early twenties, I first heard Ghalib’s ‘Hazaron Khwahishein Aisi’ in Jagjit Singh’s rendition for the TV serial Ghalib, I was astounded!…

— Arundhati Ghosh

“Do you know who W.H. Auden was, Mr. Iscariot? W.H. Auden was a poet who once said, “God may reduce you on Judgement Day…

— Stephen Adly Guirgis

“I lock my door upon myself - a poet had said. I turn my key and there's -- happiness.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying I went closer, and I did not die. Surely God…

— Mary Oliver

“It was time enough for whole lives to have been led and misled... time enough, as the poet said, to murder and create --…

— Amor Towles

I got into an argument with someone because I said I think 2Pac will be regarded as a great poet. They said he was…

— Scott Glenn

“Persian poet said, the rose blooms reddest where some buried Caesar bled. The”

— Barbara W. Tuchman