Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's.

We are apt to consider Shakespeare only as a poet; but he was certainly one of the greatest moral philosophers that ever lived.

— Mary Wortley Montagu

“For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.”

— Kathy Acker

If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.

— Nikki Giovanni

A poet is a world enclosed in a man.

— Victor Hugo

I will not go so far as to say, with a living poet, that the world knows nothing of its greatest men; but there…

— George Augustus Henry Sala

Subtract from many modern poets all that may be found in Shakespeare, and trash will remain.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our…

— Richard M. Weaver

The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a…

— Simon Schama

“The poet is just like the fabled hunter who naps beside a tree, waiting for hares to break their skulls by running headlong into…

— Gu Cheng

The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is…

— Norman Cousins

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