My name was originally John Collins, but I just didn't think it had the flair I needed. I found out the poet laureate of Poland was named Krasinski and so it seemed like a shoe-in for show business.
John Krasinski

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
Paul Muldoon

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

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
Huston Smith

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

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.
Wilfred Owen

All a poet can do today is warn.
Wilfred Owen

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Alfred de Musset

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

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.
Salvatore Quasimodo

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

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
Philip Levine

Are you really going to see Lewis? One of the few people it's worth getting excited over, I think. I know he is a good poet. I daresay he never heard of me, but I wish you would tell him that his work is the joy of my life.
Ruth Pitter

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

The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.
George Meredith

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.
Charles Ives