If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
Quotations
Poet
A few moments in a poet’s company teach us more about the essence of art than many a lecture and books.
-Etinne Gilsun
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
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
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
