Half Quote by Edmund Waller

It is a curious thing how poets tend to become ascetics.... Even a debauch for them is a self-flagellation. They go on the loose…

— D. H. Lawrence

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

— Billy Collins

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity…

— Randall Jarrell

“Contemporary poets got so obscure that poetry kind of fell out of favor,”

— Paul Ruffin

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

— Plato

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

— Diane Wakoski

Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?

— George Crabbe

“One of the more interesting things you'll notice in the entire history of poetry & poets, art & artists is those useless untalented individuals…

— R.M. Engelhardt

What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.

— Plato

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance…

— Harold Bloom

The arrogance of poets is only a defense; doubt gnaws the greatest among them; they need our testimony to escape despair.

— Francois Mauriac