Quotes on Poets

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.

Author: Robert Adamson

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

Author: Robert Adamson

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.

Author: John Barton

Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.

Author: James Broughton

Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.

Author: Richard Burton

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Author: Gilbert Chesterton

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

Author: Jean Cocteau

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

Author: Peter Davison

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

Author: Peter Davison

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

Author: Helen Dunmore

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

Author: T. Eliot

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Author: T. Eliot

They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me.

Author: Tom Glazer

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.

Author: Thom Gunn

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

Author: Brian Harris

Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Author: Horace

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

Author: Jim Jarmusch

There are very few great poets in the world.

Author: Tahar Jelloun

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

Author: Eli Khamarov

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

Author: Kenneth Koch

Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.

Author: Roger McGough

Poets are born, not paid.

Author: Addison Mizner

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

Author: Christopher Morley

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.

Author: George Murray

Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.

Author: Conor Oberst

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Author: Plato

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Author: Jack Prelutsky

The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

Author: Salvatore Quasimodo

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

Author: John Ransom

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

Author: Isaac Rosenberg

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.

Author: Carl Sandburg

I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.

Author: Carl Sandburg

It's difficult to get films made, especially films about poets.

Author: Dougray Scott

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.

Author: Wislawa Szymborska

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.

Author: Diane Wakoski

Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.

Author: Edmund Waller

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

Author: Edmund Waller