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
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.
-Dorothy L. Sayers
"Busman's Honeymoon"
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
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
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.
-Allen Ginsberg
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
