True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.—Madame Swetchine.
Modern poets mix much water with their ink.—Goethe.
There is nothing of which Nature has been more bountiful than poets. They swarm like the spawn of cod-fish, with a vicious fecundity, that invites and requires destruction. To publish verses is become a sort of evidence that a man wants sense; which is repelled not by writing good verses, but by writing excellent verses.—Sydney Smith.
There is a pleasure in poetic pains which only poets know.—Wordsworth.
An artist that works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thoughts in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.—Holmes.
A little shallowness might be useful to many a poet! What is depth, after all? Is the pit deeper than the shallow mirror which reflects its lowest recesses?—Heinrich Heine.
We praise the dramatic poet who possesses the art of drawing tears—a talent which he has in common with the meanest onion!—Heinrich Heine.
I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it), to make it bear well: and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad. I have always a sacred veneration for any one I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher; because the richest minerals are ever found under the most ragged and withered surfaces of the earth.—Swift.
Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.—Joubert.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.—Shelley.