Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
-Alfred De Musset
"Le Poète déchu"
Quotations
Poet
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
-W. H. Auden
"The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose: Volume II."
When a poet speaks to his own people, the voices of all other poets of other languages who have influenced him are speaking also.
-T. S. Eliot
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
-Plato
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
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
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
