noun

• 1A person who writes poems.

  ‘The radio play became an art form in its own right and attracted novelists and poets as well as dramatists.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘The two are linked by Heinrich Heine, the German poet whose writing spawned them.’
  • ‘I'm tempted to say that we have a good number of poets who can write but cannot read.’
  • ‘A collection of poems by Indian poets has just been translated and published in Taiwan.’
  • ‘They play a significant and neglected part in the way poets write and readers read.’
  • ‘It is in order to write that so many poets have tried to live the reveries of opium.’
  • ‘Arab poets wrote better romantic poetry than Rimbaud and Verlaine as long ago as the tenth century.’
  • ‘Picturing the unknown, they acted like novelists or poets, inviting readers to imagine hidden worlds.’
  • ‘During the nineteenth century almost all poets wrote poetry in dramatic form.’
  • ‘The poet is trying to write a poem but he does not know what he is trying to say until he has said it and recognised it.’
  • ‘Novelists, poets and playwrights all see such biographers as parasites.’
  • ‘It's an observed phenomenon that some poets go on writing wonderful poems right into a really advanced age.’
  • ‘Few poets write more than a handful of great poems, which is why the same ones keep cropping up.’
  • ‘Being everywhere at once while going nowhere in particular is what poets do, and Yeats did it.’
  • ‘The cumulative effect of these descent scenes is to establish Spenser as the poet of initiations.’
  • ‘Wordsworth has been transformed by literary theory from a poet of nature to a key figure of modernity.’
  • ‘The failed poet writes short stories, and the failed short story writer writes novels.’
  • ‘Again the essays by poets confirm this endless struggle to complete a poem.’
  • ‘Some were written by well-known romantic poets in the nineteenth century.’
  • ‘The Index reveals an alternative literary canon of the poets most widely read in printed miscellanies.’

  Synonyms

  verse writer, versifier, verse-maker, rhymester, rhymer, sonneteer, lyricist, lyrist, elegist

  View synonyms

  1. 1.1A person possessing special powers of imagination or expression.
     ‘he is more poet than academic because of his gift for language’
     More example sentences

     • ‘And those who translate such works into English today tend to be academics rather than poets.’
     • ‘The story of this disaster was developed by the imagination of numerous poets.’