Quotes About Poets

The category "Women Poets" is bizarre and irrelevant. It's a subcategory of Poets, but there is not a "Men Poets" category.

I tend to like the way poets form communities. Writing can be lonely after all. Modern life can be lonely. Poets do seem to be more social than fiction writers. This could be because of poetry's roots in the oral tradition - poetry is read aloud and even performed. I'm just speculating, of course. At any rate, because poets form these groups, they learn from one another. That is one of the best things about being a poet.

Great Poets discover themselves. Little Poets have to be 'discovered' by somebody else.

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

...these poets here, you see, they are not of this world:let them live their strange life; let them be cold and hungry, let them run, love and sing: they are as rich as Jacques Coeur, all these silly children, for they have their souls full of rhymes, rhymes which laugh and cry, which make us laugh or cry: Let them live: God blesses all the merciful: and the world blesses the poets.

It's difficult to put your own bare ass out on the limb every time you sit down to write a poem. But that's really sort of the ideal. Because if we don't discover something about ourselves and our world in the making of a poem, chances are it's not going to be a very good poem. So what I'm saying is that a lot of our best poets could be better poets if they wrote less and risked more in what they do.

I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

Do you want to guess what's in here?" I asked Dash. "I think I've got it figured out already. There's a new supply of red notebooks in there, and you want us to fill them in with clues about the works of, say, Nicholas Sparks." "Who?" I asked. Please, no more broody poets. I couldn't keep up. "You don't know who Nicholas Sparks is?" Dash asked. I shook my head. "Please don't ever find out," he said.

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.

My message is not wholly understood; only poets understand it.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed!

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.

Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.

Because poets feel what we're afraid to feel, venture where we're reluctant to go, we learn from their journeys without taking the same dramatic risks.

Man demands truth and fulfills this demand in moral intercourse with other men; this is the basis of all social life. One anticipates the unpleasant consequences of reciprocal lying. From this there arises the duty of truth. We permit epic poets to lie because we expect no detrimental consequences in this case. Thus the lie is permitted where it is considered something pleasant. Assuming that it does no harm, the lie is beautiful and charming.

OUT-OF-DOORS, n. That part of one's environment upon which no government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful to inspire poets.

And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?

Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they fancy that they produce themselves.

That's what artists do, that's what poets do - we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

The thing I like about the band [Dead Child] is that there's no pretense. We aren't even trying to be artists or poets.

When the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring.

All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.

I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Of him who walked in glory and in joy, Following his plough, along the mountain-side. By our own spirits we are deified; We Poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.

The poets get a quizzical ahem. They reflect time, I am the very ticking.

I've learned that my readings of others' work often has little connection to their intentions. This doesn't mean that my response is wrong, and it doesn't make the author's views less right. Poets, like their poems, are "hopeful monsters".

Wine has been with us since the beginning of civilization. It is the temperate, civilized, sacred, romantic mealtime beverage recommended in the Bible. Wine has been praised for centuries by statesmen, philosophers, poets, and scholars. Wine in moderation is an integral part of our culture, heritage and gracious way of life.

CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager.

Abyss-mongering makes professors and poets feel daring.

The poets who do this are uniquely conscious of this silence, this stillness.

There's always been what I would call the William Carlos Williams strain, in which poems of simplicity and clarity are valued by a different community. I was talking to Galway Kinnell one day, and he said that there was an audience for poetry up until about 1920 and then, from that point on, the poets and the critics drifted.

As poets, our lamentations are glorious, filled with the virtues angles would learn to envy.

I think right now is when we need to hear different voices coming out of all parts of the world. You can't just hear the politicians and the military leaders. You have to hear from the taxi drivers. You have to hear from the painters. You have to hear from the poets. You have to hear from the school teachers and the filmmakers and musicians.