Quotes About Poets

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education." But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get there. And the 20th century is a pretty good record of that because so many of the great poets were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, etc. They wrote their odes to Lenin and Stalin. They glorified some of the most violent and grotesque dictatorships of the 20th century. And a lot of the ones who were not Stalinists were fascists or fascist sympathizers.

Sure there are poets which did never dream Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose Those made not poets, but the poets those.

You can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.

I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.

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

Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpack. Their bedrock is thusness, their images beauty is pellucid and new, their view without limit. The shelf of essential Zen poets for American readers grows larger with this immediately indispensable collection.

This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

I feel that women of my kind are a profound mistake. There have been few women poets of distinction, and, if we count only the suicides of Sappho, Lawrence Hope and Charlotte Mew, their despair rate has been very high.

In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I.

Many are poets, but without the name;For what is Poesy but to createFrom overfeeling Good or Ill; and aimAt an external life beyond our fate,And be the new Prometheus of new men,Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain

For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.

[I]n every part of this eastern world, from Pekin to Damascus, the popular teachers of moral wisdom have immemorially been poets.

I think a lot about the poems I wasn't able to write...I masturbrated...Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. The issue is the same for all real poets. If you've been happy for too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic power...Happiness and poverty can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterword either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.

Emily Dickinson calls previous poets her kinsmen of the shelf. You can always be consoled by your kinsmen of the shelf and you can participate in poetry by going to them and by trying to make something worthy of them.

Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.

I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.

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

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

Anybody doesn't like these pitchers don't like potry, see? Anybody don't like potry go home see television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses. Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

When I first collected these authorities, I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a word; I therefore extracted from philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions.

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.

I'm trying to stay open to the idea that the Internet is not the evil foe of publishing but the handmaiden that will turn out to be a blessing for poets and writers.

I think, as poets, we are in the odd position of constantly defending our art form. Which is funny and also sort of invigorating, too. No one really says, "Oh you're a lawyer? I've never understood the law. In fact, I kind of hate it." Or, "Oh you wait tables? I didn't know that was something people did." I say it can be invigorating because, on some level, we have to evaluate what we do and why we do it almost daily. We have to explain ourselves to people all the time. We have to say, "Yes, I am a unicorn, believe in me."

As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.

The underground went really underground. Grand Funk, and all these people man are the moderate's choice of music. Underground is Yoko Ono, The Black Poets. These people scare the hell out of most freaks. They laugh at Yoko Ono, but it's the whole cliché.

... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.

... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.

Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life.

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

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

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

It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.

A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.