Poet Quotes

I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility. (U.S. poet and writer, 1943- )

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

I'm inspired by the poets, so I'm always going to give in that direction, rather than in any other. It's the making of me... and also the downfall of me.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

Sweetheart, when you break thru you'll find a poet here, not quite what one would choose.

The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.

Whatever a poet writes with enthusiasm and a divine inspiration is very fine. Earliest reference to the madness or divine inspiration of poets.

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous, He must die a little death each morning, He must swallow his toad and study his vomit as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.

Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense

Don't saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt. For a poet with all the answers, has never yet been built.

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.

God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.

Every man is a poet when he is in love.

What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

poems are small moments of enlightenment

The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

I am the scroll of the poet behind which samurai swords are being sharpened.

For as fire is kindled by fire, so is a poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.

...the poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old.

This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.

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.

The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.

Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't.

Scientist alone is true poet.

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.

Who could imagine a poet wearing anything other than black?

Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.

I’m not a poet—I’m a drifter in the arts.

Poets are band leaders who have failed.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge - they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.