Ditch Quote by Henry Miller

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this…

— Joseph Brodsky

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this…

— Joseph Brodsky

Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry…

— Dana Gioia

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

— Antonin Artaud

“War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost. Poetics and philosophies disintegrate…

— Salvatore Quasimodo

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek…

— Octavio Paz

“Many are poets, but without the name; For what is Poesy but to create From overfeeling Good or Ill; and aim At an external…

— George Gordon Byron

Everyone is their own kind of poet - you can't miss it when their words are written down.

— Sheila Heti

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of…

— Octavio Paz

No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can…

— Peter Ackroyd

Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.

— Langston Hughes

If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost…

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe