Poet Quotes · Page 46

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative…

— Jesmyn Ward

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

— John Updike

“There is no good or bad author; there is only one kind of an author, that who connects with the readers.”

— Saru Singhal

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I…

— T. S. Eliot

I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no…

— Erik Larson

We have the words in our pockets, obscure directions. The old ones have taken away the light of their presence.

— Denise Levertov

“A poet is a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or…

— Anonymous

If any of you are secret poets, the best way to break into print is to run for the presidency,

— Eugene McCarthy

I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I…

— Thom Gunn

A man sees only what concerns him… How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind…

— Henry David Thoreau

Adrienne Rich was one of the most widely-read and influential poets of her time, a leading feminist, known especially for her politically-engaged…

— Earl Scruggs

I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet." And he was…

— Allan Gurganus

In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets.…

— Henry David Thoreau

I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;"…

— Cate Marvin

Delicate, gracious, and eloquent, John Brandi's poems reveal that he remains an extraordinary profound poet of prayer and praise. His is the…

— David St. John

“A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffrings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when…

— Anonymous

Time sped. And the poet through sorrow Became like his suffering kind. Again he toiled over his poems To lighten the grief…

— Ella Wheeler Wilcox

And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.

— Elizabeth Bishop

“I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts babe we know it, that you weren't much…

— Nick Cave

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is…

— Mark Twain

“She lends her pen, to thoughts of him, that flow from it, in her solitary. For she is his poet, And he…

— Lang Leav

Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts.

— Aristotle

Take [Stéphane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him…

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I hope I can write toward my interests. But poets should be afraid of too fluidly responding to what they're interested in.

— Shane McCrae

I pulled a book by Robinson Jeffers off the shelf one day. It was powerfully moving. Tears ran down my face. That's…

— William Everson

The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way…

— Chinua Achebe

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an…

— Lascelles Abercrombie

I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading…

— Karl Kraus

“Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.”

— W. H. Auden

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

— Roberto Bolano

“Poetry is inspired by the elements of random thoughts, an overflow of gazing at the unseen.”

— Michael Bassey Johnson

Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. - A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom…

— Lewis Cass

Each of us as poets, as decent suffering human beings, has to find a way to run our lives that is compassionate…

— Sam Hamill

And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry, Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted…

— John Milton

I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to…

— Patti Smith

Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“That odd infallible sliding-like-crystal air on water that means day's left dawn for morning.”

— H.D

“Perhaps he makes a choice. He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but…

— Céline Sciamma

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but…

— Randall Jarrell

Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only…

— A. N. Wilson