A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
Heroic poetry has ever been esteemed the greatest work of human nature.
Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.
I think it was W.H. Auden who said he was lucky that his first favorite poet was Thomas Hardy, who was a good but not a great poet, because if you are exposed to the greats too soon it can just squash you as a writer.
Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
We sold 400 books of poetry and thought we were well on the way to immortality.
And mighty poets in their misery dead.
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet.
She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done.
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.
There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.
The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.
I know who the great poets are.
All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.
Take [Stéphane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him !
