British Poets Quotes & Sayings

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time. — Al Alvarez

My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself. — David Starkey

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum
however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology
he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him ... (from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124). — W.B.Yeats

Eugenio Montale - born in Genoa in 1896, died in Milan, 1981 - is one of the twentieth-century Europeans who has spoken most meaningfully to American and British poets. — Jonathan Galassi

Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest. — Tobias Hill

Life attracts life. — Paulo Coelho

I didn't work for a year after Wall Street. I finished that in November, and then it was the following October that I did Drive, so I took a year off. I didn't do anything at all, really. I just hung around. — Carey Mulligan

I started meeting the right people, like [producer] Dave [Okumu], who explained to me how songwriting is really simple - "just like shitting," he said. "You gotta let it all out." When he put it like that, however disgusting it is, it made a lot of sense to me. — Jessie Ware

I've been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I've come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters. — Arthur Smith

That's the difference between girls and women: Girls find men fascinating. Women know better. — Candace Bushnell

It is the mind that makes one wise or ignorant, bound or emancipated. — Ramakrishna

So I don't think I'll make Poet Laureate,
but I swear I'm not twisted and bitter,
If finely-wrought talents
don't weigh in the balance,
I can always write haiku on Twitter. — Rosy Cole

Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores. — Bill Alexander

I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists. — Ian McEwan

I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps. — Billy Collins