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Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles. -- Anthony Burgess
All great poets have been men of great knowledge. -- William C. Bryant
To have great poets, there must be great audiences. -- Walt Whitman
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. -- Frank Lloyd Wright
A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation. -- Ludwig van Beethoven
All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart ... -- Edith Sitwell
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry. -- Edward Hirsch
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. -- Stephen Spender
... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death? -- Erica Jong
A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. -- John Keats
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. -- Robinson Jeffers
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. -- Oscar Wilde
Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age. -- Frank Lloyd Wright
I believe in magic ... There is magic in the creative faculty such as great poets and philosophers conspicuously possess, and equally in the creative chessmaster. -- Emanuel Lasker
Love is a great poet, its resources are inexhaustible, but if the end it has in view is not obtained, it feels weary and remains silent. -- Giacomo Casanova
Some great poet or philosopher once said that " he who goes to nature for comfort must go to her empty handed " , and I think he was right. -- Flora Thompson
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
The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains - mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops. -- John Muir
When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers. -- Frank Lloyd Wright
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. -- Samuel R. Delany
Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid -- Oscar Wilde
The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy. -- Joseph Alexander Leighton
One can be a great poet and be politically stupid. -- Umberto Eco
The attention one gets from being a poet isnt great. -- Nick Flynn
The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great. -- Nick Flynn
I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet. -- Ogden Nash
No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet. -- Claude Monet
The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist. -- Steven Seagal
No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else. -- William Temple
Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring. -- Jules Renard
The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness. -- Loren Eiseley
A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves. -- Gary Snyder
You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it. -- Kenneth Koch
A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare. -- Edgar Allan Poe
I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet. -- Francois Mauriac
Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means. -- Heinrich Heine
I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings. -- Honore de Balzac
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet. -- Dick Gregory
Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand. -- Kenneth Branagh
God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven. -- Honore de Balzac
To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language. -- Octavio Paz
When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again. -- T. S. Eliot
To paraphrase the great poet Dante, the heavens swirl above us and our eyes are still cast to the ground. -- Vanna Bonta
He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. -- Thomas B. Macaulay
I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet... -- Leni Riefenstahl
Like a great poet, nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. There are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love. -- Heinrich Heine
It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events. -- John Drinkwater
It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings. -- George Bernard Shaw
A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it? -- Vera Nazarian
The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind. -- Oscar Wilde
The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689. -- Richard Flanagan
[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them. -- Anthony Minghella
[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on. -- William C. Bryant
But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist. -- Lytton Strachey
Do you remember any great poet that ever illustrated the higher fields of humanity that did not dignify the use of wine from Homer on down? -- James A. McDougall
The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even. -- Sylvia Townsend Warner
A great poet ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings... to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature. -- William Wordsworth
I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet. -- Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
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Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. -- Walt Whitman
I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet. -- Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors. -- T. S. Eliot
The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. - A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation. -- Lewis Cass
The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker. -- Lafcadio Hearn
Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it. -- Salvador Dali
One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another. -- Gerald Brenan
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
The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them. -- Clive Davis
There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this. -- Edward Hirsch
England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk. -- E. M. Forster
To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life. -- Algernon Charles Swinburne
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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