No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Quotations
Poet
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"
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
-George Sand
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.
-Dejan Stojanović
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
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"
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
