Poet Quotes · Page 22

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,

— T. S. Eliot

I am the scroll of the poet behind which samurai swords are being sharpened.

— Lester Cole

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

— Yehuda Amichai

In America they make too much fuss of poets; in London they make too little.

— Caitlin Thomas

What made me a comedian was that I wasn't really a songwriter, I was more of a poet.

— Tommy Chong

“I’m going to become a beat poet and a lesbian!”

— Benjamin R. Smith

I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I'm up against.

— Leonard Cohen

“So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay.”

— John Green

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

— Diane Wakoski

Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.

— Ken Kesey

With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them.

— Gregory Orr

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would…

— Nikki Giovanni

...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you,…

— Stanley Kunitz

Ibn Firnas was a polymath: a physician, a rather bad poet, the first to make glass from stones (quartz), a student of…

— Lynn Townsend White, Jr

O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a…

— William Butler Yeats

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

— Julian Jaynes

Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. These are simply a sun, trees, flowers, water and…

— Heinrich Heine

The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal…

— Edgar Lee Masters

“I left the bank because they wouldn’t deposit my cheque of poems. So I went to the store, but they didn’t accept…

— Kamand Kojouri

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in…

— Anonymous

Perhaps already I am dead, And these perhaps are phantoms vain;— These motley phantasies that pass At night through my disordered brain.…

— Heinrich Heine

originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté:…

— Randall Jarrell

I think we all recognize that one of the problems in American culture is that increasingly, there's no middle ground. That either…

— Frederic Tuten

But the most obvious fact about praise -- whether of God or anything -- strangely escaped me. I thought of it in…

— C. S. Lewis

I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot

— Muriel Rukeyser

For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.

— Ernest Hemingway

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

— J. D. Salinger

Drew Dellinger is a deep and courageous poet. How lucky we are!

— Alice Walker

“Passion in every word I wrote, passion in every single thought.”

— Bernard Jan

“Use all the ugliness you’re feeling to make something beautiful”

— Laura Goode

Inside every man there is a poet who died young.

— Stefan Kanfer

Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.

— Joseph Joubert

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

— Gary Snyder

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

— W. H. Auden

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

— Nell Freudenberger

“Dear Gris, if there's one thing I can't abide it's a bad poet.”

— Cat Hellisen

For poets (bear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator.

— Ben Jonson

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

— Novalis

I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry.

— Federico Garcia Lorca