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

Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.

Alphonse Daudet

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

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

Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or man.

Horace Mann

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

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

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

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.

Guillaume Apollinaire

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

Had in him those brave translunary things/ That the first poets had.

Michael Drayton

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

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

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

Dudley Moore

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

It's easier to quote poets than to read them.

Allison Barrows

[Japanese haiku poets found something morose in the sound, an omen of the cicada's short adult life.] In the cicada's cry, ... no sign can foretell how soon it must die.

Matsuo Basho

HUMANITY, n. The human race, collectively, exclusive of the anthropoid poets.

Ambrose Bierce

A poet's hope: to be,like some valley cheese,local, but prized elsewhere.

W. H. Auden

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

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.

George Grosz

The audience for dramas has always been there in the summer. It was there for us when we opened 'Dead Poets Society.' But it's always been about having the nerve to program dramas into summer. But at least on paper, next summer looks to be more diverse.

Dick Cook

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

George Santayana

The poet's business is not to save the soul of man but to make it worth saving.

James Elroy Flecker

As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.

John Keble

This year's competition for the Lilly Fellowships was fiercely competitive, and the two poets who emerged as winners are already writing at an extraordinarily high level, ... I expect readers will be hearing a lot from these two poets in the years to come.

Christian Wiman

And muse on Nature with a poet's eye.

Thomas Campbell

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.

Albert Pike

Poets are born, not paid.

Addison Mizner

He has written some of the most memorable poems of our time, and his achievement rivals that of great American poets like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop.

Christian Wiman

All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.

Delmore Schwartz

I'm inspired by the poets, so I'm always going to give in that direction, rather than in any other. It's the making of me... and also the downfall of me.

Roy Harper

We all write poems; it is simply that the poets are the ones who write in words.

John Fowles

I don't like to call myself a poet, ... Most poets are shiftless, no-account fools.

August Kleinzahler

I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.

Isaac Rosenberg

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

Anne Sexton

The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.

Max Jacob

He was fascinated, ... He and Betty Kray [a former director of the Academy of American Poets] would talk about baking bread all the time.

Anne Wright

Is she not more than painting can express,/ Or youthful poets fancy when they love?

Nicholas Rowe

There were lots of eager young faces and a variety of deliveries and musical styles, among which were dub poets.

Anthony Miller

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

Brian Harris

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.

Lucille Clifton

It didn't come from nowhere. What nurtured 'Howl' into being was the community of painters, musicians and poets who were very active before it was written.

Steve Silberman

Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.

Malcolm De Chazal

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, ... American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation.

Jonah Raskin

Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned.

Robert Adamson

Let us go and talk with the poets. (on arriving in San Francisco).

Joaquin Miller

As a new program, it's important for us to establish a high level of ambition. It's a great thing for all of our students not just the poets among us to set the bar high from the start.

Harvey Hix

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

Douglas Dunn

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.

William Wycherley

She knows more of love than the poets can say,And her eyes offer something that won't go away.

Harry Chapin

The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.

Stephen Spender

All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the truest poets must be truthful.

Wilfred Owen

Our language is polarized. Concrete words are usually the language of poets. Abstract words are usually the language of politicians.

Richard Shelton

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold.

Zelda Fitzgerald

Someone once asked him, 'How many poets do you know there?' ... He said, 'Thank God, none.' .

Anne Wright