Biographers Quote by Virginia Woolf

I don't believe a good poet is very often deliberately obscure. A poet writes in a way necessary to him or her; the reader…

— Lydia Davis

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

All poetry is difficult to read - The sense of it anyhow.

— Robert Browning

“The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back…

— David Whyte

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of…

— Joseph Brodsky

To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.

— Lucille Clifton

“I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The objection is that…

— T.S. Eliot

I'm not a poet. So the writing process is a difficult one for me.

— Billy Squier

I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short,…

— Philip Larkin

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

— Clive James

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography…

— Joseph Brodsky

“Poets don’t run out of material the way novelists do because they don’t depend on material in the same way.”

— Julian Barnes