Poet Quotes

• Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

  Robert Frost

  Baseball, Poetry, Pitching

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• A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko

  History, Poetry, Poetic

  "A Precocious Autobiography". Translated from the Russian by Andrew R. MacAndrew,

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• 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

  Rain, Voice, Rivers

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• Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

  Robert Graves

  English Grammar, Break, Should

  Lecture at Oxford. Time, December 15, 1961.

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• No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Time, Men, Profound

  Biographia Literaria ch. 15 (1817)

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• A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

  Wallace Stevens

  Writing, Men, Poetry

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• Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.

  Philip Larkin

  Poetry, Emotion, Ends

  BBC Third Programme, April 13, 1956.

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• 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

  Poetry, Identity, Literature

  John Keats (1994). “The Works of John Keats: With an Introduction and Bibliography”, p.9, Wordsworth Editions

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• A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

  Robert Frost

  Inspiration, Poetry, Delight

  Collected Poems preface (1939)

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• 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

  Knowledge, Men, Poetry

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• 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

  Nature, Celebrate, Vain

  Walter Scott, Sir Walter Scott (1841). “The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart”, p.30

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• Truth like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold screenwriter of Dead Poets' Society.

  Tom Schulman

  Truth, Dead Poets Society, Feet

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• Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

  Jean Cocteau

  Life, Art, Children

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• Poetry: the best words in the best order.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Writing, Vocabulary, Prose Poetry

  Table Talk 12 July 1827 (1835)

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• 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

  Believe, Passion, Poetry

  Lecture at Oxford. Time, December 15, 1961.

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• A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

  Robert Frost

  Love, Life, Writing

  Robert Frost, Lawrance Roger Thompson (1964). “Selected letters”

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• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Writing, Reading Poetry

  The Sacred Wood "Philip Massinger" (1920)

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• All men are poets at heart.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Heart, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.128, Harvard University Press

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• A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

  Jean Cocteau

  Nurse, Rose, Poetry

  Jean Cocteau (1926*). “A Call to Order, Written Between the Years 1918 and 1926 and Including "Cock and Harlequin", "Professional Secrets", and Other Critical Essays”

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• 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

  Clever, Prose And Poetry, Prose Poetry

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1835). “Specimens of the table talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge”, p.84

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• 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

  Games, Careers, May

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• The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

  Christopher Morley

  Courage, Art, Doors

  Christopher Morley (1925). “Forty-four Essays by Christopher Morley”

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• 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

  Strong, Eye, Science

  'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1595-6) act 5, sc. 1, l. 7

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• A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.
  Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  Robert Graves

  Perfect, Poetry, Immature

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• 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

  Passion, Men, Profound

  "Biographia Literaria". Book by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ch. XV, 1817.

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