Contemporary Quote by W. H. Auden

Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is…

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

— W. H. Auden

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

— Cecil Day-Lewis

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in…

— Edward Hirsch

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

— Virginia Woolf

You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes…

— Derek Walcott

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them,…

— Robert Graves

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work…

— Helen Vendler

Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but…

— Roland Barthes

I'm reading a manuscript by Rodney Jones, "Village Prodigies",it's one of the best contemporary poetry books I've ever read ever.

— Stephen Dobyns

I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing…

— Etel Adnan

There is no access to contemporary poetry in the libraries.

— Kwame Dawes