I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

It is being said of a certain poet that though he tortures the English language, he has never yet succeeded in forcing it to reveal his meaning.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind

They put arsenic in his meat And stared aghast to watch him eat; They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high, we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

I think that to transfuse emotion – not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer – is the peculiar function of poetry.

We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there’s an end of May.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

Cambridge has seen many strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. It is now destined to see a better scholar than Wordsworth and a better poet than Porson betwixt and between.

There, by the starlit fences,
The wanderer halts and hears
My soul that lingers sighing
About the glimmering weirs.

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I knew all her ways.

He stood, fluffing his feathers: as poet, priest of place, shoulders sloped like folded wings; magenta scarf, scarlet lining to anorak, black-rimmed spectacles and aureole of wizardly white hair.

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

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

The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn’t exist

It’s hard to put into words. Gorillas are not complainers. We’re dreamers, poets, philosophers, nap takers.

The logic of the poet – that is, the logic of language or the experience itself – develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

I cannot understand why the poets of our day wax indignant at the vulgarity of their age and complain of having come into the world too early or too late. I believe that every man of intellect can create his own beautiful fable of life.

The poet is an untier of knots, and love without words is a knot, and it drowns.

He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

Does it mean this, does it mean that, that’s all anybody wants to know. I’d say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it’s there

I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

Oh shit, I’m a dangerous man with some money in my pocket

The poet is the complete lover of mankind.

The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of “a moment of their other lives” a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.

The poets leave hell and again behold the stars.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

You can’t criticize Bob Dylan’s singing. You have to respect Billy Joel as a brilliant poet. You can’t tell me there’s a better rock band ever than Led Zeppelin. And if you speak during the Eagles’ “Last Resort,” we’re done. I’m just asking for seven minutes. This stuff really matters, you know.

Some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we’d better do something postmodernist – quickly, before somebody else did.

A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

It was just like, ‘Let’s stop playing. We really love each other. I’m scared to lose you, and you scared to lose me.

There was a touch of mysticism and poetry in her nature which made her love to gaze at the purple sunsets and watch the evening stars

Heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.

A poem is a naked person….Some people say that I am a poet.

You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet, because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist

A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner.

For me, rappers and dancers are poets and artists and oftentimes the most interesting performances are given by them.

The Boys and the Frogs SOME BOYS, playing near a pond, saw a number of Frogs in the water and began to pelt them with stones. They killed several of them, when one of the Frogs, lifting his head out of the water, cried out: “Pray stop, my boys: what is sport to you, is death to us

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are – they sort of tap dance through it.

I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.

She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her, you are her poet. But that’s all there’s to it.

I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.