By Any Other Name

No great poetry, of whatever kind, is conceivable unless the subject has become integrated with the poet's mind and mood.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Lascelles Abercrombie


Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.
------------------------------------------------------------------Vicente Aleixandre


As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
------------------------------------------------------------------Woody Allen


It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
------------------------------------------------------------------W. H. Auden


Always be a poet, even in prose.
------------------------------------------------------------------Charles Baudelaire


There exist only three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Charles Baudelaire


I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Harold Bloom


In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Kenneth Branagh


For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Joseph Brodsky


Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Joseph Brodsky


God is the perfect poet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Browning


You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
--------------------------------------------------------------------John Ciardi


The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Jean Cocteau


The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Jean Cocteau


The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Jean Cocteau


To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Sidonie Gabrielle Colette


If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.
--------------------------------------------------------------------e. e. cummings


A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
--------------------------------------------------------------------James Dickey


Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
--------------------------------------------------------------------John Drinkwater


A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Bob Dylan


I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Bob Dylan


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


To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Frost


A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Frost


Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Allen Ginsberg


A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
---------------------------------------------------------------Edmond de Goncourt


There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Anthony Hecht


The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Max Jacob


A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
----------------------------------------------------------------------Randall Jarrell


My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------John Lennon


For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Philip Levine


Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
------------------------------------------------------------------Thomas B. Macaulay


The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Eugenio Montale


The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Christopher Morley


I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
------------------------------------------------------------------------Howard Nemerov


A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Friedrich Nietzsche


All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the truest poets must be truthful.
------------------------------------------------------------------------Wilfred Owen


Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------Salvatore Quasimodo


Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------Salvatore Quasimodo


A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------Salman Rushdie


The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
----------------------------------------------------------------------George Santayana


Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
---------------------------------------------------------------------William Shenstone


The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives"-a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------Edith Sitwell


A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Wallace Stevens


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


The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------Lionel Trilling


The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Lionel Trilling


A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Paul Valery

The poet is a madman lost in adventure.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Paul Verlaine

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."
-------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Penn Warren


A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------E. B. White


It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.
----------------------------------------------------------------------Richard Wilbur

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Oscar Wilde


A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Yevgeny Yevtushenko