Away Quote by Guy Gavriel Kay

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are…

— Billy Collins

I think it's hard to be taken seriously as a poet, period.

— Amber Tamblyn

Poets take themselves very seriously.

— Grace Paley

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal -…

— May Sarton

“Poetry is a will to put things right, an imaginary solution, a way of avoiding a catastrophe that already happened. Poetry is an escape,…

— Aase Berg

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're…

— Billy Collins

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

— Charles Simic

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level…

— Johan Huizinga

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

— Seamus Heaney

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn…

— Sylvia Plath

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that…

— Joseph Brodsky

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got…

— Sylvia Plath