Poetic Mastery Quotes

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare.

I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote.

Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd

Lizzie Harris's debut collection, Stop Wanting, crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

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.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.