Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

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

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

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

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

I started out as a poet. I’ve always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.

The U.N. bureaucracy has grown to elephantine proportions. Now that the Cold War is over, we are asking that elephant to do gymnastics.

The generous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.

I just love working with Eminem. He’s just one of my favorite rappers, and his lyrics – he’s a true poet, and I enjoy that about him.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, ‚Truth is the daughter of Time.‘

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.