I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.
Most poets are mad. It doesn't qualify us for anything.
There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. "Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do." . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.
Political parties are like poets, born, not made.
Happy is the man whom the Muses love: sweet speech flows from his mouth.
Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.
In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
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.
Writers are nothing but beggars with a good line.
Poets are born, not paid.
All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.
Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
My son, O'Shea. He looks like me, and he can rhyme.
Nobody has to tell nobody nothing,” I say, taking another step forward. “You never were a poet, were you, Todd?” he says.
One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
It is necessary for us to explain the involuntary repugnance we possess for the nature and personality of the Jews. The Jews have never produced a true poet. Heinrich Heine reached the point where he duped himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization.
You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics.
Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.
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.
It seems like if they'd given Bob Dylan a pen and paper in the cradle that he would've come up with a great song. I'd love to write songs like that.
The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.
I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo to in festival terms.
