Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Thomas B. Macaulay

If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination.
David Allan Coe

A paranoiac like a poet, is born, not made.
Luis Bunuel

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.
William E. Gladstone

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.
Oliver Goldsmith

Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?
Franz Schubert

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.
Kenneth Branagh

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
Kenneth Koch

The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.
Bryant H. McGill

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.
Robert Morgan

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!
Rita Dove

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
Robert Morgan

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
Rita Dove

People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.
Rita Dove

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
Diane Wakoski

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.
Tahar Ben Jelloun

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
Leslie Fiedler

Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.
Rita Dove

One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder.
Ella Maillart

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
John Ciardi