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Poet Quotes
"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
15
"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."
10
"The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets."
10
"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses."
9
"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."
9
"Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other."
9
"Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind."
8
"It's difficult to get films made, especially films about poets."
8
"Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition."
7
"Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."
7
"I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from."
7
"Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek."
7
"I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe."
7
"Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned."
6
"I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do."
5
"Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors."
5
"The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible."
5
"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."
5
"Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation."
5
"Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse."
5
"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin."
4
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