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

Poet, Poets

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

Exlpore more Poet quotes

"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, American Musician

Poet, Poets

"I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself."

Diane Wakoski, American Poet

Poet, Poets, Tradition

"Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors."

James Broughton, American Director

Poet, Poets

"Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together."

Roger McGough, British Poet

Poet, Poets, Worth, Writers

"I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe."

Jack Prelutsky, American Poet

Poet, Poets

"Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other."

William Wycherley, English Dramatist

Poet, Poets

"I am no Poet here; my pen's the spout where the rain water of my eyes run out."

John Cleveland, English Poet

Poet, Eyes, Pen, Rain, Water

"The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them."

Salvatore Quasimodo, Italian Author

Poet, Poets

"The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

Poet, Poets

"I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie."

Carl Sandburg, American Poet

Poet, Poets, Style

Explore more quotes by Kenneth Koch

"The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel."

Travel

"Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost."

Writing

"It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling."

Travel

"It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work."

Work

"I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet."

Thought

"I'm a writer who likes to be influenced."

Influence

"I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them."

People

"As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry."

Poetry

"As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is."

Time

"I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature."

Family