What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
Soren Kierkegaard

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
Walt Whitman

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

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

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
T. S. Eliot

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
T. S. Eliot

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T. S. Eliot

A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.
Charlie Chaplin

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
Salvador Dali

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
George Orwell

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
Virginia Woolf

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
Virginia Woolf

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
John Keats

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
John Updike

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.
Ludwig van Beethoven

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Niels Bohr

Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
Helen Hayes

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.
Marcus Tullius Cicero