Best Poet Quotes

It's difficult to put your own bare ass out on the limb every time you sit down to write a poem. But that's really sort of the ideal. Because if we don't discover something about ourselves and our world in the making of a poem, chances are it's not going to be a very good poem. So what I'm saying is that a lot of our best poets could be better poets if they wrote less and risked more in what they do. ~ Sam Hamill

The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have else they will never have better. ~ Harriet Monroe

Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet? ~ Boris Johnson

The best poet is the man who delivers our daily bread: the local baker ... ~ Pablo Neruda

And my religious hunger, now invents God
To make them a frame, to fill the void.

Then my silly pious sense of harmony
Loudly rejoices in orderly actuality

But already, my fierce rebellion, the best poet
Calmly sharpens a knife on the stone of my heart. ~ Rafal Wojaczek

God Himself is the best Poet, And the Real is His song. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there. ~ Henry Miller

In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter. ~ John D'Agata

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. ~ Umberto Eco

Poetry examines an emotional truth. It's an experience filtered through the personality of the poet. We look to poetry for visions, not scientific truths. The poet's job is to combine new elements. Explore their melting, seeping into one another. ~ Diane Glancy

2. After God notices the truth about us (voiced by the poet), God responds to that truth. The poem of Jeremiah 5 continues with a presentation of God's response. The taxonomy of guilt and healing includes two dimensions of God's response to the reality of sin and guilt. First there is God's wrath, indignation, and anger. ~ Walter Brueggemann

For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us. ~ Plato

Time changes nothing, girl, but the size of your underwear ... and hopefully your hairdo. ~ Minton Sparks

They wore their hair long like a poet who hopes that romantically flowing locks will make up for a wretched inability to find a rhyme for daffodil. ~ Terry Pratchett

Hills tell old stories. Cliffs are poets with harps ~ George MacKay

We could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words' ... ~ Janet Frame

One of the towering figures of the age of Enlightenment was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, known to this day in German-speaking lands as the poet of princes and prince of poets. Unlike Voltaire, he openly practiced esoteric disciplines, particularly alchemy. He wrote a famous verse about the Cathars, which translated says: "There were those who knew the Father. What became of them? Oh, they took them and burned them!" Goethe's chief work, of course, is his Faust. As noted in chapter 8, the figure of Faust was inspired by the image of the early Gnostic teacher Simon Magus, one of whose honorific names was Faustus. While in Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth-century play, ~ Stephan A. Hoeller

A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones. ~ Ellen Key

You cannot deny the struggle; the struggle denies you. ~ Lori Jenessa Nelson

If we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that on stage. ~ Del Close

To my mind, it's one of the deepest gratifications the poet or fiction writer knows. I mean, the internal stumbling upon some satisfactory answer to the question, What is this like? Or, What does this remind me of? A comparison is laboriously but successfully introduced. You meet your metaphor, and it's good. ~ Brad Leithauser

Life is a River"

Life is a river
zig zag it goes on flowing
myriad memories quench thirst
in the swirling waves of life!

Life has its own colour
a mingling of blue, green, black and white
sweeping away all happiness and sadness
in the cascading bubbles of tears and delight

Life shares its own wisdom
to keep on flowing is its only zeal
whether it be summer or winter
life will keep on flowing but never still

Life is a river
it flows at its own pace
sometimes it may have no direction
and this is life's story and grace!

- Poet Manjushree Mohanty

Translated from Odiya to English by Poet Avijeet Das ~ Manjushree Mohanty

I may look like a beer salesman, but I'm a poet. ~ Theodore Roethke

Poets are like proverbs: you can always find one to contradict another. ~ Jules Verne

I once got a postcard from a French poet who wrote - "you don't know me but I'm always very grumpy when I get up in morning. But when I get up now I put the tea kettle on, and when it starts to sing it makes me smile - goddamn you!" That's what happened when we first designed it - we got a lot of mail. ~ Michael Graves

The poet is the priest of the invisible. ~ Wallace Stevens

When I read poetry, I want to feel myself suddenly larger ... in touch with - or at least close to - what I deem magical, astonishing. I want to experience a kind of wonderment. And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the strangeness of a world sort of recombined and reordered in the depths of a poet's soul, the world looks fresher somehow. Your daily world has been taken out of context. It has the voice of the poet written all over it, for one thing, but it also seems suddenly more alive ... ~ Mark Strand

The city shined in the sunlight like a bunch of metallic boobs. What? I'm not a poet. They look like boobs. ~ Andy Weir

I, for instance, was triumphant over everyone; everyone, of course, was in dust and ashes, and was forced spontaneously to recognise my superiority, and I forgave them all. I was a poet and a grand gentleman, I fell in love; I came in for countless millions and immediately devoted them to humanity, and at the same time I confessed before all the people my shameful deeds, which, of course, were not merely shameful, but had in them much that was "sublime and beautiful" something in the Manfred style. Everyone would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists. Then the band would play a march, an amnesty would be declared, the Pope would agree to retire from Rome to Brazil; then there would be a ball for the whole of Italy at the Villa Borghese on the shores of Lake Como, Lake Como being for that purpose transferred to the neighbourhood of Rome; then would come a scene in the bushes, and so on, and so on - as though you did not know all about it? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing. ~ R.M. Engelhardt

The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend. ~ Stephen Burt

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. ~ John Updike

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential. ~ John Drinkwater

Every poet ... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Nothing fills the world quite as poetry does. A poet need not dwell on the pagecount of his life. ~ D.A. Botta

You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti