Quotes about poet
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“A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.”

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) British comic actor and filmmaker

Hope, Romantic

“Scientist alone is true poet.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

“Poets speak of hope in ladies smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Paladin of Souls

Source: Paladin of Souls

Smile, Hope

“Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Life, Mountain, Despair

“Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Angels

“If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Dreams

“It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.”

Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) Czech bookwriter and writer

Death, Girl, Thinking

“I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Source: Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose

Life, People, World, Thinking

“I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Men, Swine

“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”

John Fowles book The French Lieutenant's Woman

Source: The French Lieutenant's Woman

“Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry

Heart

“To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

“Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool,
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Fools

“If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.”

David Carradine (1936–2009) American actor and martial artist

“A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves.”

Aphra Behn book Oroonoko

Source: Oroonoko

Life, World, Way, Soul

“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 (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

Women, Age

“You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to John Quincy Adams (14 May 1781)
1780s
Source: The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

“When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Idea

“A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

BBC Interview with Cecil Day Lewis (13 September 1957); transcripts published in "It Takes a Hero to Make a Poem" in the Claremont Quarterly (Spring 1958) http://www.frostfriends.org/FFL/Periodicals/Interview-lewis.html 1950s

Love

“Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Of Studies
Essays (1625)
Source: The Collected Works of Sir Francis Bacon

Men, History, Mathematics, Nature

“You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Source: http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/65-aug.htm Bob Dylan Interview

People

“To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Paris From My Window (1944)

Silence

“He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Sense

“Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.”

Carolyn Kizer (1925–2014) American poet

Death

“A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world…”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

World, Heart

“Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.”

Upton Sinclair book Dragon's Teeth

Source: Dragon's Teeth

Fate, Pleasure, Sadness, Suffering

“The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer ; Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher. "L’Albatros" [The Albatross] (translated by James McGowan, Oxford University Press, 1993) http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Albatros Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857) Source: Les Fleurs Du Mal

Love, Way

“The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Light

“A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.”

Frances Mayes book Under the Tuscan Sun

Source: Under the Tuscan Sun

“He was a great poet" They lamented.

No, he was not a great poet," said Theo, "He was a good poet, he could have been better. That's the real loss don't you see?”

Lloyd Alexander book The Kestrel

Source: The Kestrel

Loss

“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 21.

“A poet's work… to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

World, Fraud, Sleep

“She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence… they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good…”

Eva Ibbotson A Company of Swans

Source: A Company of Swans

Beauty, Intelligence, Thinking, Passion

“How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do"
"Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Busman's Honeymoon

Source: Busman's Honeymoon

Time

“A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

A Call to Order (1926)

“Ireland is a land of poets and legends, of dreamers and rebels. All of these have music woven through and around them. Tunes for dancing or for weeping, for battle or for love.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Tears of the Moon

Love, Music, Dance

“Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

“The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Pain, World

“a poem is a naked person... some people say that I am a poet”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Liner notes http://bobdylan.com/linernotes/bringing.html, Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

People, Personality

“I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

“She was not a poet. She was a poem.”

Deborah Levy book Swimming Home

Source: Swimming Home

“Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday.”

Ted Kooser (1939) American poet

Holiday, Valentine's Day, For Him

“Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality…and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 186)

Pain, Youth

“I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Source: Complete Poems

“I am no poet. I do not love words for the sake of words. I love words for what they can accomplish. Similarly, I am no arithmetician. Numbers that speak only of numbers are of little interest to me.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

Love

“He consorted with prostitutes and poets… and with persons even worse.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Source: Collected Fictions

Personality

“Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

Lovers

“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

World

“To have great poets,
there must be great audiences.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

“If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.”

Gregory Corso (1930–2001) American writer

“Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

People, Soul, Nature

“A poet is a musician who can't sing.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Singing

“I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Imagination

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1920s, Collected Essays and Reviews (1920), Ch. 11 - Clifford's Lectures and Essays" (1879)

Passion

“If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

“A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Reading

“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Love, Death

“[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

“The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.”

Bernard Cornwell book The Winter King

Source: The Winter King

Love, Friendship, Singing

“He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Born in Fire

“I look at you and you look at me and
deep in our hearts know it

That you weren't much of a muse,
but then I weren't much of a poet”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Heart

“The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Love, Sense, Suffering, Madness

“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

Men, Solitude, Singing

“Magnus thought of James Herondale, burning up with too much light, too much love, too much, too much- while the boy in the portrait was as lovely as a dying poet, with the fragile beauty of a candle about to gutter out.”

Cassandra Clare The Bane Chronicles

Source: The Bane Chronicles

Love, Beauty, Boy, Light

“Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 192)

Truth

“but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

God

“I'm a poet who can whine in meter”

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

“All a poet can do today is warn.”

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) English poet and soldier (1893-1918)

“Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb!”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Cry

“The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Business

“That's what falling in love really amounted to, your brain on drugs. Adrenaline and dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. Chemical insanity, celebrated by poets.”

Tess Gerritsen (1953) Chinese-American novelist

Source: Last to Die

Love

“Nations are born in the hearts of poets; they prosper and then die in the hands of politicians.”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

Stray reflections http://www.allamaiqbal.com/works/prose/english/strayreflections/index.htm

Heart

“a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

“It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 19

Love, Parting

“I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.”

Ian Fleming book Goldfinger

Source: Goldfinger

“All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

“You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Art, Search

“Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Princess

“said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

Nature

“As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree"— probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.”

Woody Allen Without Feathers

"The Early Essays".
Without Feathers (1975)

God, Tree

“A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.”

Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) French writer

Star

“When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword: Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet.”

Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

Drawing

“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 134; conclusion
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen — for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their sixties may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples; but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young man — and I can remember reading in a mathematician’s memoirs a sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty may turn out to be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

Time

“Poets are born knowing the language of angels.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Ring of Endless Light

Source: A Ring of Endless Light

Angels