Top 1200 Poet Laureate Quotes & Sayings

I started as - well, I wanted to be Poet Laureate. And I wanted to be a naturalist. That's how I began. I didn't have any desire to go and be a scientist. Louis Leakey channeled me there. I'm delighted he did. I love science. I love analyzing and making sense of all these observations. So, it was the perfect rounding off of who I was into who I am.

Part of the appeal was that Medawar was not only a Nobel Laureate, but he seemed like a Nobel Laureate; he was everything one thought a Nobel Laureate ought to be. If you have ever wondered why scientists like Popper, try Medawar's exposition. Actually most Popperian scientists have probably never tried reading anything but Medawar's exposition.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

It wasn't until I was named Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. in high school though that I officially began calling myself a poet. I just always loved writing, period.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.

As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.

There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. "Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do." . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.

I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.

How do you define a poet? It's very simple. Anyone declaring that he is a poet, is a poet.

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.

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

I'm a student at Harvard University, and currently work as the United States Youth Poet Laureate, a community organizer, and an activist.

I'm a political poet - let us say a 'human' poet, a poet that's concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that's what I'm going to use.

He was a great poet" They lamented. No, he was not a great poet," said Theo, "He was a good poet, he could have been better. That's the real loss don't you see?

My sense of the poet is classical - the poet is one who makes poems. In each book, I develop and repeat certain general themes - time, place, memory, God, history, class, race, beauty, love, poetry, identity. The core identity is the poet making the poems.

To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.

I've written on public matters, but I don't understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals... anybody who knew my work would know I'm not a contender.

A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.

A poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-age longing.

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world.

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

What's really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists.

I love John Ashbery. He's the - really the poet laureate of English language poetry, whether he's given that or not, he is to me.

One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry

My name was originally John Collins, but I just didn't think it had the flair I needed. I found out the poet laureate of Poland was named Krasinski and so it seemed like a shoe-in for show business.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Ted Hughes has been appointed poet laureate to succeed Sir John Betjeman, which is a bit like appointing a grim young crow to replace a cuddly old teddy bear.

Yes, I am the first Latino poet laureate in the United States. But I'm also here for everyone and from everyone. My voice is made by everyone's voices.

So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.

One of the appeals of William Carlos Williams to me is that he was many different kinds of poet. He tried out many different forms in his own way of, more or less, formlessness. He was also a poet who could be - he was a love poet, he was a poet of the natural order and he was also a political poet.

It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

Another trouble with poetry - and I'm gonna stop the list at two - is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader's part in the poet's autobiographical life, in the poet's memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.

I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.

That's a fairly Wordsworthian way to look at things! But yeah, actually - part of the poet's work, I think, is to maintain or reintroduce the imaginative capacity of their earlier self while nonetheless maturing. And I do think the more successful the poet is at this particular thing, the greater their achievement as a poet.

It is a tremendous honor to be named poet laureate, but one that I find humbling as well, because it's the kind of thing that makes me feel like - even as it's been bestowed upon me - I must continue to live up to what it means... Being the younger laureate in the age of social media is a new challenge.

I am honoured to have the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of my esteemed colleague and fellow poet Mr. Dennis Lee, it will be with pride and passion that I carry forward the mandate of the Poet Laureate position for the City of Toronto and its residents.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.

People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

Judge: And what is your occupation in general? Brodsky: Poet, poet-translator. Judge: And who recognized you to be a poet? Who put you in the ranks of poet? Brodsky: No one. And who put me in the ranks of humanity? Judge: Did you study it?...How to be a poet? Did you attempt to finish an insitute of higher learning...where they prepare...teach Brodsky: I did not think that it is given to one by education. Judge: By what then? Brodsky: I think that it is from God.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

Matt Mason must be declared the poet laureate of the Midwest! No other native son celebrates the overlooked America, its unsung citizens (from the anonymous poets to the part-time English teachers), and its expansive indigenous landscape, as well as he does. Mason's poetry is humorous when he wants to be quirky, heartbreaking when he wants to be eloquent, and though he moves effortlessly into other moods and geographies, he always returns to his first and most enduring love (and to what he knows best)-his homeland.

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.

When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read 'Ulysses' and that you're just giving up on children if you think it's elitist - does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn't English?

If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.... You are paid for being something less than a man. The state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.

I'm not a rock star writing poetry. I don't feel like a rock star and I don't know what one is, actually. I'm a goalie/poet or a hotel guest/poet or a father/poet.

Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.

The poet laureate of England talked about murdering Jews on the West Bank.

In days of yore, the poet's pen From wing of bird was plunder'd, Perhaps of goose, but now and then, From Jove's own eagle sunder'd. But now, metallic pens disclose Alone the poet's numbers; In iron inspiration glows, Or with the poet slumbers.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

To be a political poet means simply to be a poet, and any poet worth their salt will be a political animal in their own peculiar way - they have no choice: politics is one of the many fragments we thread into the tapestry of the poem.