Poet

A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

Randall Jarrell (1914 – 1965)

All a poet can do today is warn.

Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918)

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

Abraham Maslow (1907 – 1973)

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

Robert Frost (1874 – 1963)

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

Edmond de Goncourt (1822 – 1896)

A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

E. B. White (1899 – 1985)

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

Joseph Brodsky (1940 – 1996)

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)