"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

"The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets."

Christopher Morley, American Author

Poet, Poets

"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin."

Ernest Hemingway, American Novelist

Poet, Poets

"Poets wish to profit or to please."

Horace, Roman Poet

Poet, Poets, Profit

"Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."

Jean Cocteau, French Director

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"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

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"Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse."

John Barton, Canadian Poet

Poet, Poets

"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 can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do."

Isaac Rosenberg, English Poet

Poet, Poets

"Poets are born, not paid."

Addison Mizner, American Architect

Poet, Poets

"I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen."

Carl Sandburg, American Poet

Poet, Poets, Style

Explore more quotes by Kenneth Koch

"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 love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s."

Love

"Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers."

Man

"I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not."

Poetry

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

Travel

"I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal."

Emotional

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

Travel

"It takes a long time to publish a book."

Time

"It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in."

Humor

"When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!"

Writing