Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
Quotations
Poet
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.
-Allen Ginsberg
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
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."
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.
-Jane Kenyon
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
