Quotes About Poets

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests.

There were poets before Homer.

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

Happy World Poetry Day: 'The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?

To have great poets there must be great audiences too.

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 their best order.

We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know.

Urdu is an aristocratic language. It was not the language of the working classes. Those who are left—the artisans—speak Karkhana [factory] Urdu. The Urdu of the poets is dead.

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can't pick up a page. All the words slide off.

For poets the wages of sin are poverty.

At present they [philosophers] seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagin'd more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where 'tis impossible it can ever exist?

God thinks within geniuses, dreams within poets, and sleeps within the rest of us.

The birds, the poets of the animal creation - what though they never get beyond the lyrical! - awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children.

God thinks in the geniusses, he dreams in the poets and slumbers in the rest of humanity.

We must always remember, however,' said Psmith gravely, 'that poets are also God's creatures.

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.