Quotations About Poet

Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich. ~William Bolitho

The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood. ~Jean Cocteau

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay

You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. ~John Ciardi

To have great poets there must be great audiences too. ~Walt Whitman

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~Jean Cocteau

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. ~Yevgeny Yentushenko

God is the perfect poet. ~Robert Browning

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. ~Robert Frost

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~Percy Byshe Shelley

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~Samuel McChord Crothers

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." ~Soren Kierkegaard

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed. ~W.B. Yeats

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know. ~André Gide

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~Sainte-Beuve

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. ~Wallace Stevens

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. ~Alfred de Musset

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. ~George Sand, 1851

Always be a poet, even in prose. ~Charles Baudelaire

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem." ~Robert Penn Warren

Poets aren't very useful
Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.
~Ogden Nash

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. ~Eli Khamarov

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. ~Allen Tate


Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. ~Jean Cocteau


A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. ~Jean Cocteau


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

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. ~Rene Char


The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. ~Robert Frost

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. ~Sigmund Freud


To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~Robert Frost

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. ~Jean Cocteau


The poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. ~E.B. White


The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. ~Lionel Trilling

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. ~G.K. Chesterton

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. ~Salman Rushdie

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. ~W.H. Auden

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~Oscar Wilde