Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.
~By Aulus Gellius ~
The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.
~By Mason Cooley ~
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.
~By Peter Davison ~
The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
~By Edmund Spenser ~
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
~By Robert Morgan ~
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?
~By Robert Adamson ~
Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
~By Malcolm De Chazal ~
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.
~By Gavin Newsom ~
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.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.
~By Yevgeny Yevtushenko ~
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.
~By James Broughton ~
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.
~By Samuel Beckett ~
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.
~By Len G. Murray ~
Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
~By Dennis Potter ~
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.
~By John C. Ransom ~
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.
~By Mohsen Makhmalbaf ~
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.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.
~By John B. S. Haldane ~
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.
~By David Herbert Lawrence ~
Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.
~By Mary MacLane ~
Poets are born, not paid.
~By Addison Mizner ~
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
~By Federico Fellini ~
The American public does not know poets exist.
~By James Broughton ~
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.
~By Marilyn Hacker ~
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.
~By Albert Pike ~
Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.
~By Alphonse Daudet ~
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.
~By Lucille Clifton ~
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?
~By Richard P. Feynman ~
Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
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.
~By Tom Glazer ~
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.
~By Gabriela Mistral ~
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.
~By Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~
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.
~By Thomas Aquinas ~
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.
~By Karl Philipp Moritz ~
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.
~By Tom Wolfe ~
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.
~By Paul Auster ~
Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
~By Robert Penn Warren ~
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.
~By Kenneth Koch ~
Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
~By John Drinkwater ~
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.
~By Gustav Stresemann ~
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.
~By Sharon Olds ~
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.
~By Thom Gunn ~
I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.
~By Tom Verlaine ~
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.
~By Harold Bloom ~
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
~By Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.
~By Brian Harris ~
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.
~By William Wiley ~
Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.
~By Peter Davison ~
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.
~By George Grosz ~
Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
~By William Wycherley ~
Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.
~By James Broughton ~
Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.
~By Allen Ginsberg ~
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.
~By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ~
Science is not addressed to poets.
~By George Henry Lewes ~
There are very few great poets in the world.
~By Tahar Ben Jelloun ~
Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.
~By Carol Ann Duffy ~
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.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
~By Philip James Bailey ~
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.
~By Robert Morgan ~
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.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
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.
~By Richard Francis Burton ~
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.
~By Robert Graves ~
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.
~By Stephen Sondheim ~
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
~By Aristotle ~
I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
~By Robert Wyatt ~
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
~By Walt Whitman ~
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.
~By Michael Kinsley ~
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
~By Antonin Artaud ~
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.
~By Muriel Rukeyser ~
Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.
~By Conor Oberst ~
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
~By Robert Morgan ~
I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.
~By James Laughlin ~
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.
~By Thom Gunn ~
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.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
It's difficult to get films made, especially films about poets.
~By Dougray Scott ~
I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.
~By Charles Olson ~
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.
~By Eugenio Montale ~
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.
~By David Antin ~
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.
~By Dorothy Fields ~
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
~By James Broughton ~
In The Doors we have both musicians and poets, and both know of each other's art, so we can effect a synthesis.
~By Robby Krieger ~
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.
~By James Dickey ~
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.
~By Amber Tamblyn ~
My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.
~By Luc Ferrari ~
Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
~By Ernest Hemingway ~
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.
~By Peter Davison ~
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.
~By Guillaume Apollinaire ~
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
~By Kenneth Koch ~
Poets wish to profit or to please.
~By Horace ~
At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.
~By Marguerite Young ~
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
~By H. P. Lovecraft ~
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.
~By Sharon Olds ~
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
~By George Orwell ~
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.
~By Christopher Dawson ~
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
~By Lascelles Abercrombie ~
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.
~By Margaret Mitchell ~
Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.
~By Richard Burton ~
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.
~By Arthur Wellesley ~
Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.
~By John Barton ~
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