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 ~
Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
~By Aristotle ~
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.
~By John Barton ~
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
~By Gilbert K. Chesterton ~
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.
~By Roger McGough ~
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
~By T. S. Eliot ~
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 ~
In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.
~By Yevgeny Yevtushenko ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.
~By Jim Jarmusch ~
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 ~
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.
~By Wislawa Szymborska ~
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 ~
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 ~
The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
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 ~
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've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
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 Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
~By Aristotle ~
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 ~
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
~By Kenneth Koch ~
The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.
~By Socrates ~
Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned.
~By Robert Adamson ~
Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
~By Allen Tate ~
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 ~
When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
~By John C. Ransom ~
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.
~By Heraclitus ~
If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.
~By Peter Davison ~
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 ~
There are very few great poets in the world.
~By Tahar Ben Jelloun ~
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.
~By James Laughlin ~
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
~By H. P. Lovecraft ~
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 ~
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.
~By Olive Schreiner ~
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.
~By James Laughlin ~
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.
~By Guillaume Apollinaire ~
I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.
~By Marilyn Hacker ~
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
~By Robert Frost ~
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
~By Antonin Artaud ~
Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.
~By Allen Ginsberg ~
Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.
~By Mary MacLane ~
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
~By George Orwell ~
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.
~By Lactantius ~
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
~By Lawrence Ferlinghetti ~
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 ~
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
~By Philip James Bailey ~
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.
~By Anita Diament ~
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.
~By John Barton ~
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 ~
Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.
~By Alphonse Daudet ~
Science is not addressed to poets.
~By George Henry Lewes ~
When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue.
~By Benjamin Franklin ~
I feel very connected to poets across the country.
~By John Barton ~
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 ~
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 ~
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
~By Robert Morgan ~
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 ~
America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.
~By Rebecca H. Davis ~
At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.
~By Marguerite Young ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.
~By Edmund Waller ~
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 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 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 ~
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 ~
Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.
~By Muhammad Iqbal ~
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
~By Christopher Morley ~
American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.
~By Luc Ferrari ~
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.
~By Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~
Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.
~By Aulus Gellius ~
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 ~
Poets are born, not paid.
~By Addison Mizner ~
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.
~By Henry Miller ~
Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.
~By Miguel De Cervantes ~
Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
~By William Butler Yeats ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
It's difficult to get films made, especially films about poets.
~By Dougray Scott ~
Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
~By Malcolm De Chazal ~
Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.
~By Robert Frost ~
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 ~
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.
~By Norman MacCaig ~
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.
~By Philip Dunne ~
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.
~By Alfred Marshall ~
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.
~By Paul Muldoon ~
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.
~By David Knopfler ~
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 ~
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 ~
The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
~By Edmund Spenser ~
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
~By Jean Giraudoux ~
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