Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense.
John Barton

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.
Edmund Waller

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
Richard P. Feynman

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
Anne Stevenson

Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.
Edmund Waller

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
Plato

Poets wish to profit or to please.
Horace

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.
Brian Harris

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
Wislawa Szymborska

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
Allen Tate

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
William Wycherley

Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.
William Wycherley

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
Robert Penn Warren

Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
Ernest Hemingway

Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.
James Broughton

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
Anne Sexton

San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.
Gavin Newsom

Science is not addressed to poets.
George Henry Lewes