A. E. Housman Quotes

Nearly all men and women are poetical, to some extent, but very few can be called poets. There are great poets, small poets, and men and women who make verses. But all are not poets, nor even good versifiers. Poetasters are plentiful, but real poets are rare. Education can not make a poet, though it may polish and develop one.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others.

Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

I've written poetry most of my life.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.

A good poet's made as well as born.

Now, I do say, "It's possible. You might be the first. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the odds are very much against you." All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you.

I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

One can be well-bred and write bad poetry

You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics.