No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Quotations
Poet
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
-Dudley Moore
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
-Antoine De Saint Exupéry
Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.
-Dorothy L. Sayers
"Busman's Honeymoon"
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
