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In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W. H. AudenTo be a political poet means simply to be a poet, and any poet worth their salt will be a political animal in their own peculiar way - they have no choice: politics is one of the many fragments we thread into the tapestry of the poem.
Andre Naffis-SahelyWhy do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.
Patti SmithThere is an old Latin quotation in regard to the poet which says 'Poeta nascitur non fit' the translation of which is- the poet is born, not made.
Joseph DevlinEver been kidnapped by a poet if i were a poet i'd kidnap you put you in my phrases and meter.
Nikki GiovanniTurn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.
William CongreveIf men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being a good poet without first being a good man.
Ben JonsonHe who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry - it is he who is a poet.
Subramanya BharathiWhen you're a female poet, would you, therefore, invoke a male muse? When nuns get consecrated into their vocations, they become brides of Christ. Christ is the bridegroom. In these symbolic actions, rather than in physical actions, where a male reaches sexuality or participates in intimate exchanges, if one uses a different term - there's often a heterosexual figuring that takes place. The male poet invokes a beautiful female muse. The virginal nun consecrated invokes the male bridegroom, Christ.
Shirley Geok-lin LimA man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead.
Daniel HandlerThe Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.
George Edward WoodberryPerhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Wallace StevensDante Alighieri was not only a Christian poet or a priest, he was a man. He was a real poet. We can understand that the goal of Divine Comedy is beauty. You don't need also to understand Italian or to know Italian, because when Dante's writing, when we recite Dante out loud, it explodes a cosmos of illumination like to recite music, a symphony.
Roberto BenigniI think it was W.H. Auden who said he was lucky that his first favorite poet was Thomas Hardy, who was a good but not a great poet, because if you are exposed to the greats too soon it can just squash you as a writer.
David DuchovnyI thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like MIT to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all of my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.
James A. MichenerWith Ameen Rihani the matter is diametrically opposite to Alois Musil's Arabian Desert, in purpose, in point of view and, above all, in personal psychology... I have considerable admiration for Mr. Rihani as a writer, an authentic poet and a philosopher.
William SeabrookThe business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
Thomas HardyA poet is someone Who can pour Light into a spoon, Then raise it To nourish Your beautiful parched, holy mouth.
HafezI grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you're wooed by the music of language; you want to put that into your practice.
Alison Hawthorne DemingThe music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet
June JordanBut you have to understand that I consider myself a very modest artist, or whatever, and not of importance really at all - it is quite embarrassing to me to be asked my opinion about things. I am only a wee Scottish poet on the outside of everything.
Ian Hamilton FinlayThe more the poet grows, the deeper the level of creative intuition descends into the density of his soul. Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig deeper.
Jacques MaritainPound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
Ernest HemingwayThat perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.
Virginia WoolfIn the interest of the ethical and moral health of the country, the writer, the poet, the artist, the thinker, must hold a mirror up his or her country and say, look, this is who we are, this is how we live, this is our past, we must own it, forgive ourselves, transcend our transgressions, and become better people. Turning the tide must be a continuous effort.
Clarence MajorMy grandmother was energetic and fearless - a talented poet and songwriter. She was also interested in chemistry and history and medicine, taking care of the people in her hacienda in Mexico, delivering babies. She could have become anything, but this was the 1930s, and she was forced into an arranged marriage.
Salma HayekEvery poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.
Marge PiercyFrancois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.
John GreenThe female doesn't want a rich man or a handsome man or even a poet, she wants a man who understands her eyes if she gets sad, and points to his chest and say : 'Here is your home country.'
Nizar QabbaniThe poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards.
Sara TeasdaleAnd this tenderness was not like That which a certain poet At the beginning of the century called true And, for some reason, quiet. No, not at allย It rang out, like the first waterfall, It crunched like the crust of bluish ice And it prayed with a swanlike voice, And it broke down right before our eyes.
Anna AkhmatovaI happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.
Carolyn KizerWe canโt sit back and celebrate Martin King and ask when will there be another like him. No, no my dear young friends. We must join our voices with that blessed poet June Jordan and demonstrate that 'we are the ones weโve been waiting for.'
Vincent HardingWhen the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.
John DrinkwaterIt's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
Rita DoveIf poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Walker PercyI've always wanted to be a poet at the beginning. I would look at my grandparents' books and my parents' books. And in my family, a typical aspirational Jewish family, being a writer was very much exalted, and it seemed impossible to me, that I could ever do something like that.
Mark LeynerI pulled a book by Robinson Jeffers off the shelf one day. It was powerfully moving. Tears ran down my face. That's when I became a poet.
William EversonThomas Jefferson was a real poet. He was slick with that 'pursuit' of happiness because the 'pursuit' puts it back on you.
Will Smith