Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.
-Allen Ginsberg
Quotations
Poet
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
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"
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
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
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"
