Poet Quotes

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

You explain nothing, O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.

The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

Poet: gardener of epitaphs.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

The painter needs all the talent of the poet, plus hand-eye coordination.

The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.

He is a lyric poet . . . aloof from the swirling currents in which many of his colleagues are immersed.

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.

The poet is a bird of strange moods. He descends from his lofty domain to tarry among us, singing; if we do not honor him he will unfold his wings and fly back to his dwelling place.

No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him.

Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

The job of the poet is to render the world-to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke

I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.

I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.

To love is to transform; to be a poet.

A poet is a musician who can't sing.

These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: can't live with them, or without them!

At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.

A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

Anybody who is born in Santa Rosa must turn out to be either an artist or a poet, for the spirit of the hills gets into your blood out there.

The poet sees better than other mortals. I do not see things as they are, but according to my own subjective impression, and this makes life easier and simpler.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.

When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.

And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence.

You are a fantastic scheme of captivating ecstasy.

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

Of all the arts the living of a life is perhaps the greatest; to live every moment of life with the same imaginative commitment as the poet brings to a special field.

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

A paranoiac, like a poet, is born, not made.

When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.

The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.

He that would earn the Poet's sacred name, Must write for future as for present ages.

Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.

Good poets borrow, great poets steal

Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.