One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.
Anita Diament

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
Lucille Clifton

Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.
Olive Schreiner

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
Lascelles Abercrombie

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.
Alphonse de Lamartine

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
Philip James Bailey

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.
Jim Jarmusch

Poets are born, not paid.
Addison Mizner

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.
Allen Ginsberg

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
Robert Frost

Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.
Alphonse Daudet

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
Eli Khamarov

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Hannah Arendt

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.
Samuel Beckett

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.
John Barton

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.
Carol Ann Duffy

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Jean Cocteau

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.
Helen Dunmore

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.
Bill Cosby