I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
Anne Stevenson

The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn't exist.
Theophile Gautier

But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.
Amelia Barr

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.
Donald G. Mitchell

A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
Eyvind Johnson

Jim wanted to be known as a poet, first and foremost.
Ray Manzarek

The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.
Jacques Maritain

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
Mark Van Doren

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
Nathalie Sarraute

There is no more reason why the features belonging to a picture should be distorted for the purpose of such imaginative suggestion than that the poet's metaphors should spoil his words for the ordinary uses of man.
William H. Hunt

I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.
Ben Hecht

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.
Robert E. Sherwood

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
Edward Dahlberg

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
William Temple

I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.
Jean Toomer

The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.
Karl Shapiro

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
Edith Hamilton

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
Pierre Charles Baudleaire

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.
James Schuyler

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