Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
~By Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.
~By Samuel Beckett ~
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 ~
Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.
~By James Broughton ~
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 ~
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.
~By Bill Alexander ~
Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.
~By Alphonse Daudet ~
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 ~
Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
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 ~
The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.
~By Socrates ~
There are very few great poets in the world.
~By Tahar Ben Jelloun ~
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 ~
I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.
~By Jim Jarmusch ~
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 ~
There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.
~By Adrian Mitchell ~
Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.
~By Carol Ann Duffy ~
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
~By Eli Khamarov ~
Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.
~By Mason Cooley ~
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 ~
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
~By Aristotle ~
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 ~
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
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.
~By Herbert Read ~
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.
~By Hannah Arendt ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
~By Dennis Potter ~
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 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 ~
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 ~
Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
~By Aristotle ~
My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.
~By Rita Dove ~
I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.
~By Charles Olson ~
It is strange, how quickly people want to obligate their poets, as it were, on the exile.
~By Peter Bichsel ~
Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.
~By Peter Davison ~
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
~By Gilbert K. Chesterton ~
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 ~
Poets wish to profit or to please.
~By Horace ~
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 ~
At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.
~By Marguerite Young ~
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 ~
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
~By Kenneth Koch ~
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
~By Philip James Bailey ~
Science is not addressed to poets.
~By George Henry Lewes ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.
~By James Broughton ~
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.
~By Robert Adamson ~
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 ~
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
~By T. S. Eliot ~
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 ~
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
~By Plato ~
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 ~
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've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.
~By Alphonse de Lamartine ~
Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
~By Jean Anouilh ~
Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
~By William Wycherley ~
American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
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 ~
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 ~
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.
~By Eyvind Johnson ~
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 ~
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.
~By Heraclitus ~
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 ~
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
~By Zelda Fitzgerald ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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.
~By Robert Graves ~
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 ~
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
~By Thomas Hardy ~
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 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 ~
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 ~
Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.
~By Richard Burton ~
America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.
~By Rebecca H. Davis ~
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.
~By George Murray ~
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.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
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 ~
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 ~
Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.
~By Muhammad Iqbal ~
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 ~
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 ~
Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.
~By Mary MacLane ~
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
~By Anne Sexton ~
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 ~
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 ~
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
~By T. S. Eliot ~
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 ~
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