Companion Quote by Irving Bacheller

“We loved our father for the poet he'd become.”

— Frederick Reiken

It is not that fathers are better or worse, not that they are more loved or criticized, but rather that they are viewed with…

— Ellen Goodman

My father was a rare poet. He was somebody who worked in the trenches. When he wanted to speak about social justice or gender…

— Shabana Azmi

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

— Robert Morgan

“We can’t choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones — but we can choose how to come to terms with them.”

— Rodger Kamenetz

A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.

— Victor Hugo

A parent, unlike a poet, is not born - he is made.

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

— Felix Dennis

I'm a much better writer for being a father.

— Chris Cleave

I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my…

— Bernardo Bertolucci

I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet.

— Ogden Nash