Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
Quotations
Poet
The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.
-Jane Kenyon
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.
-Dejan Stojanović
The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
