“He [Shakespeare] was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul . . . He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.”
John Dryden
“When a man and a woman die, as poets sung, His heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue”
Benjamin Franklin
“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman”
Wallace Stevens
“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times”
Randall Jarrell
“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold.”
Zelda Fitzgerald
“A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb”
W. H. Auden
“Why are Italians at this day generally so good poets and painters? Because every man of any fashion amongst them hath his mistress”
Robert Burton
