There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
Tom Wolfe

There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.
Adrian Mitchell

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
Eugenio Montale

They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me.
Tom Glazer

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
Wislawa Szymborska

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.
John C. Ransom

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
Walt Whitman

Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.
Richard Burton

Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race: by falling into a daily fit of passion, I proved to the governor and his son, who were profuse in their attentions, that I was in earnest.
Richard Francis Burton

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Well, we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars, but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets.
George Murray

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
John C. Ransom

When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.
Jack Prelutsky

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue.
Benjamin Franklin

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.
Thom Gunn

Whilst in Prussia poets only speak of the love of country as one of the dearest of all human affections, here there is no man who does not feel, and describe with rapture, how much he loves his country.
Karl Philipp Moritz

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.
Guillaume Apollinaire

Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
Malcolm De Chazal

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
Antonin Artaud