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 poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
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"
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
-Pablo Neruda
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
-Plato
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
-W. H. Auden
