Knew Quote by Billy Collins

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

— Billy Collins

“I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for…

— William Matthews

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

— William Wordsworth

“There are only two kinds of people in this world who want to be miserable: poets and method actors.”

— Steve Kaplan

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.

— William Cowper

It was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone…

— Jane Austen

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

— Kate Morton

I used to think all poets were Byronic Mad, bad and dangerous to know. And then I met a few. See Lamb 486:25.

— Wendy Cope

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

— Billy Collins

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

— Søren Kierkegaard