One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had…

— Nadine Gordimer

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

— Kenneth Branagh

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in…

— Sarah Kay

Whatever is genuine in social relations endures, despite of time, error, absence, and destiny; and that which has no inherent vitality had better die…

— Henry Theodore Tuckerman

A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.

— Gary Snyder

I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming…

— Clive Davis

“No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.”

— Anonymous

“A great poet gives words wings to fly in the reader's perceptual sky.”

— Debasish Mridha

The way a great poet takes an idea, small like the bud of a flower and makes it bloom. And makes you feel deeply..

— Melody Minagar

It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in…

— Anonymous

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

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

— Umberto Eco

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

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

“Basil my dear boy puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life…

— Oscar Wilde