Poet Quotes · Page 123

We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots,…

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet.

— Anonymous

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter…

— Algernon Charles Swinburne

I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan…

— John Ashbery

Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers,…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

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

— Nikki Giovanni

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor,…

— D. H. Lawrence

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in…

— Herbert Read

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

— Edmund Wilson

Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.

— Horace

When we come down into the distant village, visible from the mountain-top, the nobler inhabitants with whom we peopled it have departed,…

— Henry David Thoreau

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

— Edward Hirsch

A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through…

— Gary Reilly

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage…

— James Elroy Flecker

Next, suddenly, lightning suddenly, while I am still a child, a branch is lopped from my being, and a portion of my…

— Hal Porter

Criticism is infested with the cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men,…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“She who is a dancer can only sway the silk of her hair like the summer breeze.”

— Shah Asad Rizvi

Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power.

— Paul Fry

[Bob Dylan] is a preacher but also a sinner; a poet but also a pitchman; authentic all-American but also invented persona.

— Jay Michaelson

Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side, And madness chooses out my voice again, Again.

— Louise Bogan

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

— Nicholson Baker

Like the musician, the painter, the poet and the rest, the true lover of flowers is born, not made.

— Celia Thaxter

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision…

— Rita Dove

I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm…

— Diane Wakoski

To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.

— Terence McKenna