Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
Quotations
Poet
A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.
-Jay Z
"Decoded"
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"
Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.
-Kathy Skaggs
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
Poets create gods, philosophers destroy them.
-Marty Rubin
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
