Poet Quotes

• Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

  Robert Frost

  Baseball, Poetry, Pitching

  32 Copy quote

• Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

  Tracy K. Smith

  Eye, Writing, Space

  9 Copy quote

• A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko

  History, Poetry, Poetic

  "A Precocious Autobiography". Translated from the Russian by Andrew R. MacAndrew,

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

  Pablo Neruda

  Rain, Voice, Rivers

  22 Copy quote

• Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Beauty, Thoughtful, Poetry

  "The Poetic Principle". Essay by Edgar Allan Poe, 1850.

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.

  Mary Ruefle

  World, Common, Yearning

  8 Copy quote

• It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Roles, Looks, World

  1979 TheMyth Makers,'Pasternak'.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Poetry, Achievement, Mind

  11 Copy quote

• I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

  Bob Dylan

  Musician, Writing Songs, Firsts

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

  William Shakespeare

  Strong, Eye, Science

  'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1595-6) act 5, sc. 1, l. 7

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Time, Men, Profound

  Biographia Literaria ch. 15 (1817)

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

  Robert Graves

  English Grammar, Break, Should

  Lecture at Oxford. Time, December 15, 1961.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

  Christopher Morley

  Courage, Art, Doors

  Christopher Morley (1925). “Forty-four Essays by Christopher Morley”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

  Salvador Dali

  Clever, Flower, Men

  Preface to Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1968)

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

  Jean Cocteau

  Poetry, Poetic, Invention

  9 Copy quote

• There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.

  William Cowper

  Pain, Poetry, Poetic

  'The Task' (1785) bk. 2 'The Timepiece' l. 285

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

  Wallace Stevens

  Writing, Men, Poetry

  16 Copy quote

• Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Life, Poetry, World

  A Defence of Poetry (written 1821) See Auden 22; Auden 39; Andrew Fletcher 1; Samuel Johnson 22; Twain 104

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

  Robert Frost

  Inspiration, Poetry, Delight

  Collected Poems preface (1939)

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

  Robert Frost

  Love, Life, Writing

  Robert Frost, Lawrance Roger Thompson (1964). “Selected letters”

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Mean, Expression

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Passion, Men, Profound

  "Biographia Literaria". Book by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ch. XV, 1817.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

  John Keats

  Poetry, Identity, Literature

  John Keats (1994). “The Works of John Keats: With an Introduction and Bibliography”, p.9, Wordsworth Editions

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.

  Philip Larkin

  Poetry, Emotion, Ends

  BBC Third Programme, April 13, 1956.

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Country, Great Poet, Universal

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1855). “The Works: Kavanagh. Outre-Mer”, p.69

  11 Copy quote

  Show source