Quotes of: Poets Keyword

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

Ivan Turgenev

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

Jeffery Deaver

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

Lascelles Abercrombie

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

Nell Freudenberger

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

Rita Dove

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

Salvatore Quasimodo

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

To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.

Richard Wilbur

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.

Tom Verlaine

A true poet is one who can appreciate the disciplines and structures of any and all styles of poetry.

Life

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

Virginia Woolf

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

W. H. Auden

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.

Yusef Komunyakaa

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'

Helen Vendler

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

Salman Rushdie

So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

...real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

If pain is a pot of boiling water, humor can be the rising steam.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

The Dyer's Hand

While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.

The Dunciad

Them lady poets must not marry, pal.

The Dream Songs: Poems