These poet quotes will inspire you. Poet, one who writes poetry or a person possessing special powers of imagination or expression.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging poet quotes, poet sayings, and poet proverbs.
Best Poet Quotes
- “Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.” ~ Robert Frost
- “A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.” ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko
- “I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.” ~ Pablo Neruda
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“Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.” ~ Robert Graves
- “No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.” ~ Wallace Stevens
- “Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transference.” ~ Philip Larkin
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“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” ~ Robert Frost
- “A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.” ~ John Keats
- “Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.” ~ Sigmund Freud
- “Call it not vain: they do not err Who say that when the poet dies Mute Nature mourns her worshipper, And celebrates his obsequies.” ~ Walter Scott
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“Truth like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold screenwriter of Dead Poets’ Society.” ~ Tom Schulman
- “Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.” ~ Jean Cocteau , Poet quotes about life
- “Poetry: the best words in the best order.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.” ~ Robert Graves
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“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” ~ Robert Frost
- “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” ~ T. S. Eliot
- “A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.” ~ Jean Cocteau
- “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; – poetry = the best words in the best order.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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“All men are poets at heart.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.” ~ T. S. Eliot
- “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” ~ Robert Graves
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“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.” ~ Christopher Morley
- “No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.” ~ Rene Char
- “One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.” ~ W. H. Auden
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“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.” ~ Bob Dylan
- “A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.” ~ W. H. Auden
- “Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.” ~ Philip James Bailey , Poet quotes about love
- “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.” ~ Salvador Dali
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“But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” ~ Robin Williams
- “The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.” ~ W. Somerset Maugham
- “The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.” ~ Lionel Trilling
- “Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.” ~ Thomas B. Macaulay
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“You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.” ~ John Adams
- “It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.” ~ V. S. Pritchett
- “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” ~ T. S. Eliot
- “Everybody has their own idea of what’s a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino – they’re all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.” ~ Bob Dylan
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“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” ~ Robert Frost
- “All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.” ~ Mary Ruefle
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“The poet is the priest of the invisible.” ~ Wallace Stevens
- “A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.” ~ E. B. White
- “You ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with certainty. They come unsummoned, directly, indirectly – I could seize them with my hands – out in the open air, in the woods, while walking, in the silence of the nights, at dawn, excited by moods which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound and roar and storm about me till I have set them down in notes.” ~ Ludwig van Beethoven
- “Modesty, is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.” ~ Miguel de Cervantes
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“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.” ~ T. S. Eliot
- “Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.” ~ Rumi
- “Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.” ~ Khalil Gibran
- “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” ~ T. S. Eliot
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“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” ~ Robert Frost
- “But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.” ~ Robert Frost
- “Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identity and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views.” ~ Robert Graves
- “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” ~ William Wordsworth
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“Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.” ~ Carl Sandburg
- “Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.” ~ Dennis Gabor
- “Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
- “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.” ~ John Ciardi
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“There is no remedy for love but to love more.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
- “Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” ~ John Keats
- “Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.” ~ Bruce Lee
- “Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” ~ Don Marquis
