A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
Quotations
Poet
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
-Alfred De Musset
"Le Poète déchu"
Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.
-Allen Ginsberg
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
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."
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
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
