Great Poet Quotes

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness? ~ Susanna Kaysen

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry. ~ Edward Hirsch

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that. ~ Clive James

[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on. ~ William C. Bryant

I look at the great poets of the Soviet Union, like Anna Akhmatova, who endured far worse then anything we've seen or hopefully that we will ever see. If they could keep writing and keep a voice alive, keep people hopeful through their poetry, then I would be ashamed to stop and to give in. It would be really self-indulgent, unacceptable, and inexcusable to walk away from it. ~ Sara Paretsky

He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendental ideal. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

It turned out he wasn't just a poet. He was also a politician, a teacher, a lawyer, a scholar, and a knight. I thought one dream was enough for a person, but reading his story, I learned some people could hold on to many different dreams and see them all come true. ~ Aisha Saeed

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid. ~ Umberto Eco

Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. ~ Walt Whitman

When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again. ~ T. S. Eliot

It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history. ~ Joseph Brodsky

To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language. ~ Octavio Paz

It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

A great poet can give wings to abstract thoughts that touch a reader's mind with the ecstasy of joy. ~ Debasish Mridha

When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship. ~ David Mitchell

I'm a boxing junkie, a serial-killer junkie, and a classical guitar junkie. All of these guys are great, poetic references. ~ Mark Kozelek

The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family. If you don't have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don't have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, 'Love each other or perish'. ~ Mitch Albom

The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring. ~ Jules Renard

You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it. ~ Kenneth Koch

Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind. ~ Dudley Nichols

I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

When I say be creative I don't mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem. ~ Osho

The genius of happiness is still so rare. To possess it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar, but to treat it with the proud generosity of a prince; to bring to its totality the deep understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment and ingenuousness of a child. ~ Ellen Key

I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings. ~ Honore De Balzac

Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes. ~ Roberto Calasso

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. ~ Emily Dickinson

I like to borrow a metaphor from the great poet and mystic Rumi who talks about living like a drawing compass. One leg of the compass is static. It is fixed and rooted in a certain spot. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a huge wide circle around the first one, constantly moving. Just like that, one part of my writing is based in Istanbul. It has strong local roots. Yet at the same time the other part travels the whole wide world, feeling connected to several cities, cultures, and peoples. ~ Elif Shafak

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. ~ Virginia Woolf

Lewis said sadly to me, 'When I at last realized that I was not, after all, going to be a great man...' I think he meant 'a great poet. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Rama, the ancient idol of the heroic ages, the embodiment of truth, of morality, the ideal son, the ideal husband, and above all, the ideal king, this Rama has been presented before us by the great sage Valmiki. No language can be purer, none chaster, none more beautiful, and at the same time simpler, than the language in which the great poet has depicted the life of Rama. ~ Swami Vivekananda

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689. ~ Richard Flanagan

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature
for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk. ~ E. M. Forster

The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude. ~ Sigmund Freud

As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, "God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death." ~ Andrew Davies

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else. ~ William Temple

Let us be thankful that there is no court by which we can be excluded from our share in the inheritance of the great poets of all ages and countries, to which our simple humanity entitles us. ~ James Russell Lowell

One of my favorite artists is Tom Waits, whom most people think of as a wonderful singer-songwriter and a great poet. I certainly think of him that way, but I also know him as a terrific actor. You know, that persona that he puts on when he's doing his music comes from being an actor, figuring out a persona. ~ Jeff Bridges

To paraphrase the great poet Dante, the heavens swirl above us and our eyes are still cast to the ground. ~ Vanna Bonta

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart ... ~ Edith Sitwell

The first piece of advice I would give any writer is to read a lot and to read widely. Firstly you start to realize what's out there and what isn't out there. Publishers are looking for stories that haven't been told before. Reading other people can also improve your own writing. I love reading poetry even though I wouldn't think of writing it. A great poet can say in two lines what it takes me a whole novel to express. If I've learned from any kind of writing, it's poetry – and the lesson is concision. What can you leave out and the reader will still get the message? ~ Ian Rankin

Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India. ~ Aravind Adiga

And when a philosopher looks to poets, to a great poet like Milosz, for lessons in how to individualize the world, he soon becomes convinced that the world is not so much a noun as an adjective. ~ Gaston Bachelard

Suddenly, he wanted some credit for it. He wanted someone to thank him for not crapping on the institution of love. He wanted someone to thank him for not being yet another dilettante. He wanted someone to thank him for quitting poetry. He wanted some great poet to thank him for quitting poetry instead of desecrating it with his amateurishness. He wanted some unborn child to thank him for not conceiving her and not leaving her a hope chest full of mawkish villanelles. He wanted some sort of organization of martyrs to give him an award. He wanted to be decorated for not putting up a fuss. He wanted to be the president of forgettable people. He wanted there to be a competition for the least competitive person, and he wanted to win that competition. He wanted some sort of badge or outfit or medal or key or hat. He wanted to be asked to stand. He wanted to be considered. He wanted to be considered in earnest before being ignored. He wanted all the insane and beautiful and passionate people in the world to take one moment of silence in gratitude for the ones who had ceded them the stage-- he, the unread poet, the sacrifice, the schoolteacher-- he wanted one goddamned moment of appreciation. ~ Amity Gaige

I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them. ~ Clive Davis

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

But I'm a woman, and as the great poet so cleverly wrote, hell
hath no fury as a woman scorned. Consider me your personal hell. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Here was a man who was trapped in a thicket of fear and confusion, powerless to escape. Dante's verse captured the feeling of my own depression and anxiety precisely. Wild animals blocked the man's path at every turn. Suddenly the shade of a great poet of antiquity, Virgil, appears before the man and promises to show him the hard road to a good place - but first the man has to trust him. ~ Rod Dreher

I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often have I seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain. ~ Willa Cather

Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Do you know what constitutes a great poet? He is a person without shame, incapable of blushing. Ordinary fools have moments when they go off by themselves and blush with shame; not so the great poet ... If you really have to quote someone, quote a geographer; that way you won't give yourself away. (p 44) ~ Knut Hamsun

The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Like a great poet, nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. There are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love. ~ Heinrich Heine

I'm not touching that one with tongs and a gas mask."
"-Jericho ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire. ~ Kenneth Clark

A great poet can give nobler and more precious gifts to his country than the greatest philanthropist or politician. ~ Orna Ross

He was a great poet" They lamented.
No, he was not a great poet," said Theo, "He was a good poet, he could have been better. That's the real loss don't you see? ~ Lloyd Alexander

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. ~ Virginia Woolf

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Some great poet or philosopher once said that " he who goes to nature for comfort must go to her empty handed " , and I think he was right. ~ Flora Thompson

Goethe, the great poet-philosopher, once wrote: "I find more and more that it is well to be on the side of the minority, since it is always the more intelligent. ~ Humphrey Bancroft Neill

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize. ~ Oscar Wilde

Good poets borrow, great poets steal ~ T. S. Eliot

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

No more than a famous master can be replaced and another take over the completion of the half-finished painting he has left behind can the great poet and thinker, the great statesman and the great soldier, be replaced. For their activity lies always in the province of art. It is not mechanically trained but inborn by God's grace. ~ Adolf Hitler

No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet. ~ Claude Monet

Poshlust," or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature - these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as "America is no better than Russia" or "We all share in Germany's guilt." The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as "the moment of truth," "charisma," "existential" (used seriously), "dialogue" (as applied to political talks between nations), and "vocabulary" (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name - that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost's favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wrec ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The following obituary appeared in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph of Sept. 16, 1958:

A GREAT POET died last week in Lancieux, France, at the age of 84.

He was not a poet's poet. Fancy-Dan dilletantes will dispute the description "great."

He was a people's poet. To the people he was great. They understood him, and knew that any verse carrying the by-line of Robert W. Service would be a lilting thing, clear, clean and power-packed, beating out a story with a dramatic intensity that made the nerves tingle.

And he was no poor, garret-type poet, either. His stuff made money hand over fist. One piece alone, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, rolled up half a million dollars for him. He lived it up well and also gave a great deal to help others.

"The only society I like," he once said, "is that which is rough and tough - and the tougher the better. That's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people."

He found that kind of society in the Yukon gold rush, and he immortalized it. ~ Robert W. Service

When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can't suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy - or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn't shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all. ~ Dorothea Lasky

Life is a great poetry.
To live it at its best
Write a love story
And be a great poet.

Life is a great poetry.
To love it at its best
Love everyone earnestly,
Without judging for a crest.

Life is a great poetry.
To live it at its best
Create a great history
Before going for the rest.

Life is a great poetry.
To paint it at its best
Through colors openly
As if, life is not a test.

Life is a great poetry.
To enjoy it at its best
Enjoy a golden dusk party
When birds return to nest. ~ Debasish Mridha

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. ~ Oscar Wilde

Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dear Producers,
Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTV's "Real World." Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet uncontoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niche's, due.

I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!

Oscar Wilde wrote, "Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write." As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing. ~ Dave Eggers

Whatever is genuine in social relations endures, despite of time, error, absence, and destiny; and that which has no inherent vitality had better die at once. A great poet has truly declared that constancy is no virtue, but a fact. ~ Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors. ~ T. S. Eliot

For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's hard to say something about Pushkin to a person who doesn't know anything about him. Pushkin is a great poet. Napoleon is not as great as Pushkin. Bismarck compared to Pushkin is a nobody. And the Alexanders, First, Second and Third, are just little kids compared to Pushkin. In fact, compared to Pushkin, all people are little kids, except Gogol. Compared to him, Pushkin is a little kid.
And so, instead of writing about Pushkin, I would rather write about Gogol.
Although, Gogol is so great that not a thing can be written about him, so I'll write about Pushkin after all.
Yet, after Gogol, it's a shame to have to write about Pushkin. But you can't write anything about Gogol. So I'd rather not write anything about anyone. ~ Daniil Kharms

I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things. "The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize." "Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat. ~ Alan Bennett

Genius is original, unique; and in whatever form it may develop itself is the greatest gift that can be given to man, the strongest known link between the material life we have and the spiritual life that we can only guess at. Every great poet, painter, or musician - every inventor or man of science, every fine actor or orator, comes to us as the exponent of something diviner than we know. We cannot understand it, but we feel it, and acknowledge it. ~ Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do. ~ Isaac Rosenberg

A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet ... yet the fool has never read Shakespeare. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. ~ John Keats

There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this. ~ Edward Hirsch

The significance of King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza is not only demonstrated through its positioning inside the pyramid structure, but also through its size. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

George Lazenby is no one's favorite James Bond, but for me the anonymity at the center of this lavish production only serves to reveal the Bond machine firing on all cylinders: superb editing and photography, incredible score, great setpieces. The most romantic in the series, and it actually has, of all things, a tragic ending. ~ Christopher Nolan

There were strange noises in the room, great bellowing sobs that did not sound like anything human. They bounced off the wals, echoing in her ears. Stop! she wanted to cry at the person who was making the noise. Then she realised that it was her. ~ Kate Williams

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university. ~ Aldo Leopold

The art of flatterers is to take advantage of the foibles of the great, to foster their errors, and never to give advice which may annoy. ~ Moliere

A great leader has to be flexible, holding his ground on the major principles but finding room for compromises that can bring people together. A great leader has to be savvy at negotiations so we don't drown every bill in pork barrel bridges to nowhere. I know how to stand my ground - but I also know that Republicans and Democrats need to find common ground to stand on as well. ~ Donald J. Trump

If I wanted you to understand it, I would have explained it better. ~ Johan Cruijff

There's a powerful transformative effect when you surround yourself with like-minded people. Peer pressure is a great thing when it helps you accomplish your goals instead of distracting you from them. ~ Po Bronson

The fun of the game is right now. A lot of people don't really realize that. They think you have to get to the top to start having fun, and it's not. It's the journey getting to the top where everything is always great. I'm on the 'Ferris Bueller' thing where I look around every once in a while so I don't miss it. ~ Christian Kane

The mind is a magnet and we attract that with which we identify the self. In order to get the most out of life we must learn consciously to change many of our habitual thought patterns. This is not easy, for our old thought patterns cling to us with great tenacity, but, being thought patterns, they can be reversed. If you are filled with fear, refill yourself with faith, for faith always overcomes fear. ~ Ernest Holmes

I'm a Christian. I believe that greatness has to do with the quality of love shown to the least of thy brethren and the quality of service to those who are catching hell. When you look at it in that sense, I'd say America has had great moments, but I wouldn't call it a great nation. I don't think there have been any great nations in the history of the world, because in every nation you find poor people being subjugated. So, I see the term "great nation" as a contradiction, as an oxymoron. ~ Cornel West

I lived for a long time under vast porticos
That maritime suns tinted with a thousand fires,
And whose great pillars, straight and majestuous
In the evening made seem like basaltic caves. ~ Charles Baudelaire

You can take great comfort now in knowing that after a while, everything that happens to you, everything you dig up, even all the dirt, becomes exceedingly precious and simply divine. Strange but true. Strange because it doesn't readily make sense, but true because the deeper you go, the closer you get and the closer you get, the more peaceful and indestructible you become. Being more firmly grounded, and having acquired considerable depth, you are no longer easily thrown or confused by the fickle finger of fate, not easily so paralyzed or disturbed by circumstances beyond your control; you are centered. ~ Karol Jackowski