Poets

See Also: WRITERS/WRITING

1. All good verses are like impromptus made at leisure —Joseph Joubert
2. Composed poetry … like a dancer working at the barre, continually exercising the power of imagining, like a muscle that demanded flexing and stretching —Arthur A. Cohen
3. Explaining how you write poetry … it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife —Phillip Larkin
4. He [the poet] approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification —E. B. White
5. Like science, poetry must fix its thought in thing and symbol —Dilys Laing
6. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting —Robert Frost
7. Like marijuana smoke are poet’s verses —Jaroslav Seifert
8. Poems are like people … there are not many authentic ones around —Robert Graves
9. The poet is like the prince of the clouds who rides the tempest … exiled on the ground, amidst boos and insults, his giant’s wings prevent his walking —Charles Baudelaire
10. Poetry is like light —Delmore Schwartz
11. Poetry is like painting; one piece takes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you keep at some distance —Horace
12. Poetry … is like spray blown by some wind from a heaving sea, or like sparks blown from a smouldering fire: a cry which the violence of circumstances wrings from some poor fellow —George Santayana
13. Poets … are conductors of the senses of men, as teachers and preachers are the insulators —Karl Shapiro

    The simile is taken from a prose poem entitled As You Say (not without sadness), Poets Don’t See They Feel It contains another simile which sheds light on the poet as one who strips away insulation: “He pulls at the seams [of insulation] like a boy whose trousers are cutting him in half.”

14. Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things —Robert Frost
15. Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo —Don Marquis, The Sun Dial, 1878
16. Rhymes you as fast as a sailor will swear —Babette Deutsch

    The simile is from a poem honoring John Skelton.

17. They [poets] are honored and ignored like famous dead Presidents —Delmore Schwartz
18. To try to read a poem with the eyes of the first reader who read it is like trying to see a landscape without the atmosphere that clothes it —W. Somerset Maugham
19. To write a lyric is like having a fit, you can’t have one when you wish you could … and you can’t help having it when it comes itself —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
20. Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down —Robert Frost