Quotes About Poets

Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

Dorrigo Evans was unable to make head or tail of it. His tastes were in any case already ossifying into the prejudices of those who voyage far into classics in adolescence and rarely journey elsewhere again. He was mostly lost with the contemporary and preferred the literary fashions of half a century before—in his case, the Victorian poets and the writers of antiquity.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

The poets of each generation seldom sing a new song. They turn to themes men always have loved, and sing them in the mode of their times.

Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.

Are not poets men who fulfill their hopes prematurely?

when a great war has cut off the young men of a nation it never can be told thereafter what losses of scholars, poets, thinkers and great designers the country and the world have suffered.

Unless we consent to lack the common things which men call success, we shall hardly become heroes or saints, philosophers or poets.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot

Freedom needs all her poets; it is they Who give her aspirations wings, And to the wiser law of music sway Her wild imaginings.

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.

Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.

I think all the poets and artists have always written for peace and love, and it hasn't changed much in the last two or three thousand years. But we hope.

It's just that very few poets disturb the peace to any degree.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets; it's not either/or, it's not over or against.

While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.