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

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

A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet.
George Henry Lewes

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

In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications program. That's how I got involved; I got involved in a little play.
Danny Glover

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

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

The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.
Lafcadio Hearn

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

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
Rita Dove

The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.
Lafcadio Hearn

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

Potter is jealous of potter, and craftsman of craftsman; and the poor have a grudge against the poor, and the poet against the poet.
Hesiod

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

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

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

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

Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle

Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.
Leslie Fiedler