A Quote by Countee Cullen

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

Countee Cullen

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Am Going Poet

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Countee Cullen
American - Novelist
May 30, 1903 - January 9, 1946

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.

Donald Hall

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.

Clive James

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.

Juan Felipe Herrera

Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.

Patti Smith

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.

W. S. Di Piero

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

Edward Hirsch

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.

Stevie Smith

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.

Alice Walker

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

Billy Cannon

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

Yehuda Amichai

I am NOT an anarchist. Never have been, never will be. Just because Crimethinc put out two of my poetry books, I am labeled everywhere as an anarchist poet. I am a poet, yes. Not an anarchist. I have no formulated political philosophy other than a general feeling of disgust for the majority of the human race.

Raegan Butcher

...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.

Susan Sontag

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?

Lloyd Alexander

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

Virginia Woolf

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.

Erica Jong

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.

Ian Mcewan

A Quote by Countee Cullen

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