Sayings about Poets
A poet is born not made. ~ Traditional Proverb
Poverty makes thieves, like love makes poets. ~ Indian Proverbs
We all have something of a doctor, a poet and a fool. ~ Chilean Proverbs
Poets know all about famous places without having been there. ~ Japanese Proverbs
Slowly but surely the excrement of foreign poets will come to your village. ~ Malian Proverb
Quotations about Poets
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession. He requires whatever it needs to be completely his own master. ~ Robert Graves
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten. ~ Edith Sitwell
In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood. ~ Jean Cocteau
Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich. ~ William Bolitho
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin. ~ Edmond de Goncourt
Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rhythmbound in poets’ minds, defying time and age. ~ David J. Beard
Salts of lemon never fails to remove ink spots. A great many would-be poets should buy the salts by the barrel and pickle their effusions in it. ~ Mary Wilson Little
Lyres are placid in the hands of poets; but the true lyre is the poet himself. ~ Alexandre Vinet
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. ~ Jean Cocteau
The gaze of nature thus awakened dreams and pulls the poet after it. ~ Walter Benjamin
[N]ature-loving poets…. the children of the sunlight, the minstrels of the groves and the companions of the moors. ~ W.H. Gresswell
The secrets of Nature’s beauty, as well as of her philosophy, must be interpreted, and poets are God’s interpreters to make these secrets plain. ~ J. M’Dermaid
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth — the true poet is very near the oracle. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin
The poet needs to admire; he is in a merely human sense the high priest of the true, the beautiful, the grand. On whatever side he spreads his wings it is his mission to bear the universal homage to these worthy objects, or to some ideas of them. ~ Alexandre Vinet
The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were. ~ Cervantes
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
How happy it made her! And what beautiful things these poets always thought of and said! ~ S.J. Adair Fitz-Gerald
The poet who knows one human can portray a hundred. ~ Marie Dubsky
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one. ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on. ~ Emily Dickinson
Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else. ~ Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
The poet sees and selects from on high and afar, and hardly inquires about what is near at hand. ~ Alexandre Vinet
The eye is the only note-book of the true poet. ~ James Russell Lowell
Poets’ Pens, pluckt from Archangels’ wings. ~ John Davies of Hereford
Poets are candid. They tell us not under an abstract, but an individual form, in which reality breathes, what humanity thinks in the most secret recesses of its mind. ~ Alexandre Vinet
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand. ~ Plato
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. ~ W.H. Auden
To have great poets there must be great audiences too. ~ Walt Whitman
A poet can survive anything but a misprint. ~ Oscar Wilde
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer…. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. ~ E.B. White
Poets touch forcibly and truly that invisible lyre which echoes in unison in all human souls. ~ Alexandre Vinet
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. ~ Eli Khamarov
A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke. ~ Max Eastman
The true poem is the poet’s mind.~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Always be a poet, even in prose. ~ Charles Baudelaire
God is the perfect poet. ~ Robert Browning
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. ~ Alfred de Musset
The poet illuminates us by the flames in which his being passes away. ~ Alexandre Vinet
To form the complete poet, neither heart only, nor head only, is sufficient; the complete poet must have a heart in his brain, or a brain in his heart. ~ George Darley
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body. ~ Francis Bacon
Poetry is creative; to be a poet is to remake the universe. ~ Alexandre Vinet
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
The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed. ~ W.B. Yeats
Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully. ~ Aristotle
Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently. ~ Jean Cocteau
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. ~ Allen Tate
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads to madness. ~ Christopher Morley
A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. ~ Salman Rushdie
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. ~ Rene Char
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. ~ John Ciardi
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. ~ Jean Cocteau
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. ~ Randall Jarrell
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~ Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. ~ Wallace Stevens
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. ~ W.H. Auden
The poet 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. ~ Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton
We ask the poet: ‘What subject have you chosen’ instead of: ‘What subject has chosen you?’ ~ Marie Dubsky
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed. ~ Umberto Eco
As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence. ~ W. H. Auden
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. ~ Robert Frost
True poets are those who have received from God, together with the gift of expression, the power of penetrating further than others into the things of the heart and the life. ~ Alexandre Vinet
[I]n every part of this eastern world, from Pekin to Damascus, the popular teachers of moral wisdom have immemorially been poets… ~ Sir William Jones
The job of the poet is to render the world — to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do. ~ Mark Van Doren
True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age. ~ Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature. ~ Jean Cocteau
The poet… may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. ~ Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. ~ Jean Cocteau
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale ’til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
The desert attracts the nomad, the ocean the sailor, the infinite the poet. ~ Author Unknown
It’s easier to quote poets than to read them. ~ Allison Barrows
[T]rue poets… can pierce through the clouds to the light, and save the purity of their inspiration from the general disorder. It is refreshing to read them, delightful to steep ourselves in their truthful poetry. ~ Alexandre Vinet
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens. ~ Jean Cocteau
A poet is someone who is astonished by everything. ~ Author Unknown
A poet is a painter of the soul. ~ Isaac D’Israeli