A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
Quotations
Poet
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
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
-Søren Kierkegaard
"Fear And Trembling; Repetition"
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
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 should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.
-Criss Jami
