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._