Take [Stéphane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him !

The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters

Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words.

Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet. I had a discourse, an encounter with these people but I never had a list of questions.

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

The only refuge left to us was the poet's ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.

He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master.

We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.

Ausonius must be read to be believed! As poet, no subject is too trivial for him; as courtier, no flattery too excessive.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth…but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

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

I am not as these are, the poet saithIn youth's pride, and the painter, among menAt bay, where never pencil comes nor pem

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

[Bob Dylan] is a preacher but also a sinner; a poet but also a pitchman; authentic all-American but also invented persona.

Thomas Jefferson was a real poet. He was slick with that 'pursuit' of happiness because the 'pursuit' puts it back on you.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

The artist looks for a subject. You know, a lot of new poets don't seem to have a subject. I don't totally understand that.

What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't.

The category "Women Poets" is bizarre and irrelevant. It's a subcategory of Poets, but there is not a "Men Poets" category.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

I hope I can write toward my interests. But poets should be afraid of too fluidly responding to what they're interested in.

Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.

A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.

The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances.

The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song.

Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.

The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

To me the Muses truly gave / An envied and a happy lot: / E'en when I lie within the grave, / I cannot, shall not, be forgot.

I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.

We are apt to consider Shakespeare only as a poet; but he was certainly one of the greatest moral philosophers that ever lived.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons.

I love John Ashbery. He's the - really the poet laureate of English language poetry, whether he's given that or not, he is to me.

There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work.

Call it not vain: they do not err Who say that when the poet dies Mute Nature mourns her worshipper, And celebrates his obsequies.

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