Poetic Recognition Quotes

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

I think it's hard to be taken seriously as a poet, period.

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.

Stand still, true poet that you are! I know you; let me try and draw you. Some night you'll fail us: when afar You rise, remember one man saw you, Knew you, and named a star!

I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.

Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.

In the world of British poetry, Carol Ann Duffy is a superstar.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.

The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

The spirit of the poet craves spectators... even if only buffaloes.

Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned.

The American public does not know poets exist.

It is almost impossible for the poetess, once laurelled, to take off the crown for good or to reject values and taste of those who tender it.

In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.

All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.

The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.