quotes about Poet
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Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.
-- A. N. Wilson -
The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
-- A. R. AmmonsSource : A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr
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Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.
-- Abraham Cowley -
Poets are born, not paid.
-- Addison MiznerSource : Oliver Herford, Ethel Watts Mumford Grant, Addison Mizner (1908). “The Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom”
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In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.
-- Al AlvarezSource : Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.40, Bloomsbury Publishing
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.
-- Aldo Leopold -
The poet's place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature.
-- Aldous Huxley -
A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
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A poem's life and death dependeth still Not on the poet's wits, but reader's will.
-- Alexander Brome -
Dulness! whose good old cause I yet defend, With whom my muse began, with who shall end.
-- Alexander Pope -
Then from the Mint walks forth the man of rhyme, Happy to catch me, just at dinner-time.
-- Alexander Pope -
Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.
-- Alexandre Dumas -
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The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog.
-- Algernon Charles Swinburne -
To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.
-- Algernon Charles Swinburne -
As a poet and writer in general I feel very grateful that I can just make a chapbook and that we don't have the expenses of filmmakers.
-- Ali LiebegottSource : "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. October 25, 2013.
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Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
-- Alice Munro -
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When the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring,
-- Alister E. McGrath -
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
-- Allen TateSource : allen tate (1953). “the man of letters in the modern world”
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In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
-- Allen TateSource : allen tate (1953). “the man of letters in the modern world”
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I think most poets are natural witnesses and were curious about everything.
-- Allison Hedge Coke -
Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.
-- Amiri Baraka -
Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become.
-- Amy Lowell -
Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.
-- Amy LowellSource : Amy Lowell (1931). “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry”, p.11, Ardent Media
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Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.
-- Anais Nin -
But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
-- Andrew MotionSource : "Laureate and hardy". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. September 15, 2002.
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Who could imagine a poet wearing anything other than black?
-- Ann Demeulemeester -
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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
-- Anne Carson -
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
-- Anne SextonSource : Anne Sexton (1975). “The Awful Rowing Toward God”, Boston : Houghton Mifflin
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Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
-- Anne Stevenson -
I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
-- Anne Stevenson -
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There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
-- Anthony Hecht -
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
-- Antonin Artaud -
What the poet is searching for is not the fundamental I but the deep you.
-- Antonio MachadoSource : Antonio Machado (2011). “Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado”, p.149, Wesleyan University Press
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All I ask, is the privilege for my masculine part the poet in me.... If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom... I lay down my quill and you shall hear no more of me.
-- Aphra BehnSource : Aphra Behn (2014). “Behn Five Plays”, p.11, Bloomsbury Publishing
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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
-- Archibald MacLeish -
I express myself in sculpture since I am not a poet.
-- Aristide MaillolSource : Aristide Maillol, Waldemar George (1965). “Aristide Maillol”
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It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy.
-- Aristophanes -
These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: can't live with them, or without them!
-- AristophanesSource : Aristophanes (1954). “Lysistrata: an English version by Dudley Fitts”
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Children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.
-- Aristophanes -
The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
For within livin structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.
-- Audre Lorde -
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
-- August Wilson -
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Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.
-- Augustus William Hare -
The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?
-- Augustus William Hare -
Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
-- B. F. Skinner -
The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.
-- Babette Deutsch -
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The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.
-- Barbara HollandSource : Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt
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The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.
-- Basil Bunting -
The Poet's leaves are gathered one by one, In the slow process of the doubtful years.
-- Bayard TaylorSource : Bayard Taylor (1863). “The Poet's Journal”, p.122
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A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic.
-- Beatrice Wood -
The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator.
-- Ben Jonson -
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Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.
-- Bernie TaupinSource : "Bernie Taupin: What I've Learned" by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. January 2, 2012.
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But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright
-- Beth HenleySource : "Expressing "The Misery and Confusion Truthfully": An Interview with Beth Henley". "American Drama" Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2005.
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Lovers, Lunatics and poets are made of same stuff.
-- Bhagat Singh -
How do you define a poet? It's very simple. Anyone declaring that he is a poet, is a poet.
-- Billy Cannon -
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One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
-- Billy Collins -
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
-- Billy CollinsSource : FaceBook post by Billy Collins from May 31, 2013
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I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
-- Bob Dylan -
I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word.
-- Bob Dylan -
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The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?
-- Brion GysinSource : Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Ian Sommerville (1973). “Brion Gysin let the mice in”, Ultramarine Pub Co
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This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we--even our poets and musicians and inventors--never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials to build from. All we can know about the act of creation must be derived from what we can gather about the relation of the creatures to their Creator
-- C. S. Lewis -
I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.
-- Carl Rakosi -
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I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.
-- Carol Ann DuffySource : Carol Ann Duffy (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.122, Pan Macmillan
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a poet will even face death when he sees his people oppressed.
-- Carolina Maria de JesusSource : Carolina Maria de Jesus (2005). “Beyond All Pity”
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Every poet hopes that after-times Shall set some value on his votive lay.
-- Caroline NortonSource : Caroline Sheridan Norton (1859). “Poems”, p.11
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Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.
-- Carolyn Kizer -
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A poet, to whom no one cruel and imposing listens, / Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust,
-- Carolyn Kizer -
Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.
-- Charles Bukowski -
Who all in raptures their own works rehearse, And drawl out measur'd prose, which they call verse.
-- Charles Churchill -
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Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians-they're the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker.
-- Charles de Lint -
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.
-- Charles OlsonSource : Charles Olson (1966). “Selected Writings of Charles Olson”, p.16, New Directions Publishing
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I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.
-- Charles Olson -
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We must all teach ourselves to be fine, to be poets.
-- Charles Webster Hawthorne -
A poet must have died as a man before he is worth anything as a poet.
-- Christian Morgenstern -
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
-- Christopher Morley -
Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.
-- Clarence Darrow -
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No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
-- Claude Monet -
The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
-- Clifton Fadiman -
For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.
-- Cornel West -
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
-- Countee CullenSource : "Yet Do I Marvel" l. 13 (1925)
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If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.
-- Countee CullenSource : Countee Cullen (2013). “Countee Cullen: Collected Poems: (American Poets Project #32)”, p.31, Library of America
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A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.
-- Criss Jami -
When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.
-- Criss Jami -
Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.
-- Dan Quisenberry -
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Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.
-- Dan SimmonsSource : Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.238, Spectra
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Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
-- Dan SimmonsSource : Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.238, Spectra
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In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.
-- Dana Gioia -
Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.
-- Dana GioiaSource : Dana Gioia (2003). “Barrier of a common language: an American looks at contemporary British poetry”, Univ of Michigan Pr
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I am not as these are, the poet saithIn youth's pride, and the painter, among menAt bay, where never pencil comes nor pem
-- Dante Gabriel RossettiSource : Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Sonnets LXXIV: LXXV:LXXVI: Old And New Art”
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Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight.
-- David Biespiel -
.. but all of a sudden they’re poets, right, like that’s all it takes — being in love.
-- David Sedaris -