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"
Quotations
Poet
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 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."
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
-Alfred De Musset
"Le Poète déchu"
Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.
-Kathy Skaggs
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
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
-Jean Cocteau
Poets create gods, philosophers destroy them.
-Marty Rubin
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
