Quotes about Poets

"Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content."
-Alfred De Musset

"The poet, whether in prose or verse, the creator, can only stamp his images forcibly on the page, in proportion, as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them."
-Rod Sterling

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

"Let the poet always walk thus."
-Alfred Victor Vigny

"Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love."
-Philip James Bailey

"Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other."
-William Wycherley

"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

"Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Muse. a matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance."
-Louis Untermeyer

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
-Charles Baudelaire

"The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep."
-Jacques Maritain

"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

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

"To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty: to be a poet at forty is to be a poet."
-Eugene Delacroix

"Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech."
-Henry David Thoreau

"There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality."
-Oscar Wilde

"At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets. "
-Oscar Wilde

"Talent is like a faucet; while it is open, you have to write. Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance."
-Jean Anouilh

"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
-William Faulkner

"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."
-Muriel Rukeyser

"Poets now read all over the place, but at that time they didn't - if they were famous, they maybe read at the Museum of Modern Art."
-Jonah Raskin

"Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive."
-Alphonse De Lamartine

"I used to think all poets were Byronic."
-Wendy Cope

"Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony."
-Guillaume Apollinaire

"What impressed me about Peter is that although he was a poet himself, he reviewed poetry for the love of the art form, rather than to promote his own work. He was, in fact, always very modest about his own work and very generous and encouraging to other poets."
-Irene Clurman

"Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets."
-Dudley Moore

"Trust me, no tortures which the poets feign, can match the fierce, the unutterable pain, he feels, who night and day, devoid of rest, carries his own accuser in his breast."
-Juvenal