Quotes and Sayings about Poets
"I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from."
- Robert Adamson
(Related: Poets, Pretty)
"Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned."
- Robert Adamson
(Related: Poets, World)
"He was certainly in a confused state. I used to go and visit him in Callan Park. They were really - to me they were the best poets those two writing in those days but it wasn't very encouraging because, well, they weren't getting far were they?"
- Robert Adamson
(Related: Encouraging, Poets, State, Visit, Writing)
"Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores."
- Bill Alexander
(Related: Force, Intellectuals, Poets, Spain, Workers, Writers)
"Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance."
- Jean Anouilh
(Related: Inspiration, Importance, Poets)
"The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember."
- David Antin
(Related: Anxiety, Help, Memories, Poems, Poets)
"Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony."
- Guillaume Apollinaire
(Related: Men, Nature, Artists, Poets)
"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."
- Thomas Aquinas
(Related: Being, Myths, Philosophy, Poets, Wonder)
"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."
- Hannah Arendt
(Related: Love, Experience, Mistake, People, Poets)
"It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully."
- Aristotle
(Related: Art, Lies, Poets)
"Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully."
- Aristotle
(Related: Art, Lies, Poets)
"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others."
- Antonin Artaud
(Related: Poetry, Poets, Reading, Worth)
"I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table."
- Paul Auster
(Related: Food, Poetry, Money, Work, Poets)
"Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love."
- Philip James Bailey
(Related: Love, Truth, Poets)
"The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like."
- John Barton
(Related: Children, Community, Fact, Jobs, Poets)
"Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense."
- John Barton
(Related: Curiosity, Empathy, Poets, Will)
"Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse."
- John Barton
(Related: Poets)
"I feel very connected to poets across the country."
- John Barton
(Related: Country, Poets)
"Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity."
- Samuel Beckett
(Related: Intelligence, Humanity, Poets, Sense)
"It is strange, how quickly people want to obligate their poets, as it were, on the exile."
- Peter Bichsel
(Related: People, Poets, Want)
"All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is."
- Harold Bloom
(Related: Encouragement, Inheritance, Poets)
"Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness."
- James Broughton
(Related: End, Poets, Sadness, Youth)
"In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets."
- James Broughton
(Related: Poetry, Poets, University, World)
"The American public does not know poets exist."
- James Broughton
(Related: American, Poets, Public)
"Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors."
- James Broughton
(Related: Poets)
"Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be."
- James Broughton
(Related: People, Poets)
"In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness."
- Norman O. Brown
(Related: Money, Science, Common sense, Famous, First, Paradox, Poets, Psychoanalysis, State)
"Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race."
- Richard Burton
(Related: Poets, Race)
"Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race: by falling into a daily fit of passion, I proved to the governor and his son, who were profuse in their attentions, that I was in earnest."
- Richard Francis Burton
(Related: Son, Passion, Poets)
"Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world."
- Miguel De Cervantes
(Related: Virtue, Modesty, Poets, World)
"She knows more of love than the poets can say, and her eyes offer something that won't go away."
- Harry Chapin
(Related: Love, Eyes, Poets)
"Women make us poets, children make us philosophers."
- Malcolm De Chazal
(Related: Women, Children, Poets)
"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
(Related: Poets)
"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."
- Lucille Clifton
(Related: Poetry, Mistake, People, Poets, Wishes)
"Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."
- Jean Cocteau
(Related: Poets)
"Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: People, Historians, Poets)
"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Poetry, Order, Poets, Prose, Words)
"Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Love, Time, Difference, Old, Poets)
"Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die."
- Bill Cosby
(Related: Hope, Children, Immortality, Now, Poets, Reason)
"Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children."
- Alphonse Daudet
(Related: People, Children, Eyes, Poets, World)
"America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer."
- Rebecca H. Davis
(Related: America, May, Poets, Will)
"The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work."
- Peter Davison
(Related: Work, Performance, Poets, Sense, Tradition, Trouble)
"If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets."
- Peter Davison
(Related: Poets)
"Frost is the most sophisticated of poets."
- Peter Davison
(Related: Poets)
"But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way."
- Peter Davison
(Related: Freedom, Poets)
"But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them."
- Christopher Dawson
(Related: Work, Folk, Heroes, Hollywood, Myths, Poets)
"One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked."
- Anita Diament
(Related: English, Favorite, Poets)
"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."
- James Dickey
(Related: Poetry, Harm, Honor, Poets)
"In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Love, Poets)
"My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Favorite, May, Poems, Poets)
"Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events."
- John Drinkwater
(Related: Men, Greatness, Events, Man, Poets)
"Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings."
- Carol Ann Duffy
(Related: Feelings, Language, Poets, Trying, Writing)
"Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Poets, Words)
"The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Men, Poets)
"I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Progress, Poems, Poets, Reading, Sense, Writers)
"It's easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time."
- Philip Dunne
(Related: Time, England, Italy, Living, Poems, Poets, Spring)
"The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Poets)
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Poets)
"Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets."
- Federico Fellini
(Related: Money, Poetry, Poets)
"We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Change, Consciousness, Poets, World)
"My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me."
- Luc Ferrari
(Related: Artists, Poets, Sisters, World)
"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?"
- Richard P. Feynman
(Related: Beauty, Science, Atoms, Night, Poets, Stars)
"I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Men, Women, Talent, Poets, Song, Writing)
"Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold."
- Zelda Fitzgerald
(Related: Heart, Poets)
"We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words."
- John Fowles
(Related: Poems, Poets, Words)
"When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue."
- Benjamin Franklin
(Related: Men, Heart, Poets, Tongue, Woman)
"Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Baseball, Moments, Poets)
"Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Business, Money, Poets, Poor, Talk)
"Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time."
- Aulus Gellius
(Related: Time, Daughter, Truth, Memory, Name, Old, Poets, Present)
"Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels."
- Allen Ginsberg
(Related: Angels, Eyes, Poets)
"As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum."
- Jean Giraudoux
(Related: War, Poets, Will)
"They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Poets)
"Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science."
- Robert Graves
(Related: Science, Forget, Language, Poets, Scientists)
"Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time."
- Robert Graves
(Related: Time, Money, Idea, Poets, Public, Talking, Word, Writing, Wrong)
"The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit."
- George Grosz
(Related: Business, Individuality, Personality, Poets, Profit)
"While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Work, Curiosity, Poets)
"I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Poets, Reading, State, Students)
"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: American, Culture, Literary, Living, Poets, Teaching, Wonder, Writing)
"I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Women, Accident, First, Poets)
"And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art."
- John B. S. Haldane
(Related: Art, Science, Artists, Poets)
"Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them."
- Thomas Hardy
(Related: Argument, Custom, Manners, Morals, Poets)
"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."
- Roy Harper
(Related: Direction, Poets)
"Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence."
- Brian Harris
(Related: Poets, Words)
"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Poets)
"I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets."
- Heraclitus
(Related: Libraries, Poets)
"Poets wish to profit or to please."
- Horace
(Related: Poets, Profit)
"Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians."
- Muhammad Iqbal
(Related: Nations, Poets, Politicians)
"I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way."
- Jim Jarmusch
(Related: Poets)
"Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision."
- Jim Jarmusch
(Related: Vision, Language, Poets, Sense)
"A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published."
- Jim Jarmusch
(Related: Money, Acceptance, First, Poets)
"There are very few great poets in the world."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Poets, World)
"Artist - musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Life, Perception, Artist, Musicians, Poets, Popular, Writers)
"Many men of science and poets have in their own manner, by various ways and means, and aided by others, sought unceasingly to create a more tolerable world for everyone."
- Eyvind Johnson
(Related: Men, Science, Poets, World)
"Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition."
- Eli Khamarov
(Related: Poets, Possession, Soldiers, Words)
"If sexual intercourse, as the poets tell us, began in 1963, it was another decade and a half before the American political system began to take notice."
- Michael Kinsley
(Related: American, Poets)
"I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there."
- David Knopfler
(Related: Poetry, Feeling, Illusion, Magic, Now, Poets)
"Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation."
- Kenneth Koch
(Related: Poets)
"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."
- Kenneth Koch
(Related: People, Encouraging, Criticism, Poets, Trouble)
"In The Doors we have both musicians and poets, and both know of each other's art, so we can effect a synthesis."
- Robby Krieger
(Related: Art, Effect, Musicians, Poets)
"It is possible that Mount Olympus may have supplied the poets with the hint for saying that Jupiter obtained the kingdom of heaven, because Olympus is the common name both of the mountain and of heaven."
- Lactantius
(Related: Heaven, May, Name, Poets, Saying)
"The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind."
- Lactantius
(Related: Gods, Mind, Poems, Poets, Spirit)
"Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive."
- Alphonse de Lamartine
(Related: Heroes, Poets, Race)
"Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going."
- James Laughlin
(Related: Poetry, Idea, Poets)
"I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets."
- James Laughlin
(Related: Difficulty, Poets)
"I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian."
- James Laughlin
(Related: Poetry, Friend, Poets, Reading)
"It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance."
- David Herbert Lawrence
(Related: God, Humor, Performance, Being, Blind, Driving, Poets, Sense)
"Science is not addressed to poets."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Science, Poets)
"The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(Related: Old, Poets)
"But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?"
- H. P. Lovecraft
(Related: Dreams, Poets)
"And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping."
- Norman MacCaig
(Related: Eyes, Name, Poets, Thinking)
"Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest."
- Mary MacLane
(Related: First, Poets)
"Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth."
- Mohsen Makhmalbaf
(Related: God, Truth, Thought, Poets)
"In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old."
- Alfred Marshall
(Related: Age, Life, Time, People, Heroes, Old, Poets)
"Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together."
- Roger McGough
(Related: Poets, Worth, Writers)
"Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil."
- Henry Miller
(Related: Action, Difference, Doctrine, Evil, Example, Poets, World)
"At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues."
- Gabriela Mistral
(Related: Fortune, Poets, Race, Voice)
"There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends."
- Adrian Mitchell
(Related: Experience, Friends, Innocence, Poets, Songs)
"The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings."
- Margaret Mitchell
(Related: Doctors, Lawyers, Poets, Soldiers)
"Poets are born, not paid."
- Addison Mizner
(Related: Poets)
"There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry."
- Eugenio Montale
(Related: Poetry, Connection, Poets, Prose)
"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."
- Eugenio Montale
(Related: Negative, Exercise, Liberty, Poets, Self)
"Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Poems, Poets, Writing)
"The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Poetry, End, Language, Poets, Writing)
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Example, Fiction, Poets, Writing)
"Whilst in Prussia poets only speak of the love of country as one of the dearest of all human affections, here there is no man who does not feel, and describe with rapture, how much he loves his country."
- Karl Philipp Moritz
(Related: Love, Country, Man, Poets)
"The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets."
- Christopher Morley
(Related: Poets)
"Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent."
- Paul Muldoon
(Related: Living, Poets)
"Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level."
- Paul Muldoon
(Related: Day, Ireland, Poets, Sense)
"Well, we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars, but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets."
- George Murray
(Related: Poets, Reality, Romantic, Stars, Thinking)
"And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns."
- Len G. Murray
(Related: Heroes, Poets, Wonder, Writers)
"San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind."
- Gavin Newsom
(Related: Leader, Artists, Film, Generations, Poets)
"Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam."
- Conor Oberst
(Related: Poets, Sleep, Will, Words)
"There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die."
- Sharon Olds
(Related: Society, Encouraging, Books, Poets, Writers)
"Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me."
- Sharon Olds
(Related: Books, Poems, Poets, Wonder)
"I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire."
- Charles Olson
(Related: American, Envy, Poets, Reason)
"Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers."
- George Orwell
(Related: Creation, Language, Poets, Workers)
"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."
- Albert Pike
(Related: Men, Genius, Artists, Poets, Poor, World)
"Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand."
- Plato
(Related: Poets)
"Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Poetry, Children, Poets)
"When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all."
- Jack Prelutsky
(Related: Children, Now, Poets, Voice, Want, Writing)
"I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe."
- Jack Prelutsky
(Related: Poets)
"The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them."
- Salvatore Quasimodo
(Related: Poets)
"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."
- John C. Ransom
(Related: Excess, Nonsense, Now, Poets)
"When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble."
- John C. Ransom
(Related: Poets, Prose, Style, Waiting)
"The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists."
- Herbert Read
(Related: Power, Quality, Civilization, Wealth, Artists, Culture, Military, Poets, Worth)
"I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do."
- Isaac Rosenberg
(Related: Poets)
"In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty."
- Muriel Rukeyser
(Related: Free speech, Poems, Poets, Writing)
"The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help."
- Carl Sandburg
(Related: Time, Help, Poets)
"I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen."
- Carl Sandburg
(Related: Poets, Style)
"I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie."
- Carl Sandburg
(Related: Poets, Style)
"Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it."
- Olive Schreiner
(Related: Love, God, Blood, Old, Poets, Right, Sin, Water)
"All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives."
- Delmore Schwartz
(Related: Husbands, Poets, Wives)
"It's difficult to get films made, especially films about poets."
- Dougray Scott
(Related: Poets)
"Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance."
- Anne Sexton
(Related: Moderation, Poets, Saints)
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
(Related: Legislators, Poets, World)
"The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods."
- Socrates
(Related: Gods, Poets)
"I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean."
- Socrates
(Related: Wisdom, Poetry, Inspiration, Instinct, Poets)
"Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it."
- Stephen Sondheim
(Related: Language, Poets, Poor, Writers)
"The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death."
- Edmund Spenser
(Related: Death, Genius, Monuments, Poets, Will)
"Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Poetry, Criticism, Poets)
"A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind."
- Gustav Stresemann
(Related: Nature, People, English, Mankind, Poets, Shakespeare)
"Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings."
- Wislawa Szymborska
(Related: Inspiration, Fortune, May, Poets)
"Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind."
- Wislawa Szymborska
(Related: Poets)
"A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it."
- Amber Tamblyn
(Related: Politics, Democracy, Past, Poems, Poets, Today)
"Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results."
- Allen Tate
(Related: Men, Poets, Results)
"I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality."
- Tom Verlaine
(Related: Quality, Poets, Sound, Wonder)
"American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did."
- Diane Wakoski
(Related: American, Poets)
"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."
- Diane Wakoski
(Related: Poets, Tradition)
"I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc."
- Diane Wakoski
(Related: Beauty, Women, Sex, Ideas, Attitude, Language, Poets, Race)
"Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek."
- Edmund Waller
(Related: Poets)
"Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot."
- Edmund Waller
(Related: Poets, Praise)
"Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money."
- Robert Penn Warren
(Related: Money, People, Observation, Poets)
"I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example."
- Arthur Wellesley
(Related: Example, Friends, Hate, Poets, Race, Word)
"To have great poets, there must be great audiences."
- Walt Whitman
(Related: Audiences, Poets)
"All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed."
- William Wiley
(Related: Artists, Being, Kids, Poets, Pretty, School)
"There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone."
- Tom Wolfe
(Related: Time, Men, Genius, Destiny, Earth, Famous, Man, Now, Poets, Woman)
"I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers."
- Robert Wyatt
(Related: Nature, People, Poets, Workers)
"Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other."
- William Wycherley
(Related: Poets)
"Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate."
- William Wycherley
(Related: Debt, Friends, Hate, Poets)
"Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top."
- William Butler Yeats
(Related: Growing up, Irish, Now, Poets, Trade)
"In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies."
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
(Related: Enemies, Poets, Russia)
"At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age."
- Marguerite Young
(Related: Age, Old, Poets, Will)