And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
Norman MacCaig

When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.
Norman MacCaig

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
Marilyn Hacker

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau

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

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

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
Jean Cocteau

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau

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

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
Jean Cocteau

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
Ivan Turgenev

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

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
Tom Wolfe

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

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
Jose Saramago

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.
Karl Jaspers

No bad man can be a good poet.
Boris Pasternak

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
Sinclair Lewis

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.
Heinrich Heine

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
David Carradine