The American public does not know poets exist.
James Broughton

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.
David Antin

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
Christopher Morley

The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.
John Barton

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit.
George Grosz

The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
Robert Morgan

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
T. S. Eliot

The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.
Salvatore Quasimodo

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.
Socrates

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.
Helen Dunmore

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.
Lactantius

The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
Edmund Spenser

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
Carl Sandburg

The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings.
Margaret Mitchell

The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.
Peter Davison

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.
Herbert Read

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.
Sharon Olds

There are very few great poets in the world.
Tahar Ben Jelloun