There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
James Thurber

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.
Paul Engle

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Paul Engle

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
Gustave Flaubert

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
Edith Sitwell

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

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
George Sand

Everything on this record is what I really wanted to say, and I'm back to being the poet I always thought I was.
Stevie Nicks

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

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned.
Robert Adamson

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We are proud to have with us the poet lariat of Chicago.
Richard J. Daley

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.
Andre Gide

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.
Marlon Brando

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
E. M. Forster