At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.