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
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
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."
A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.
-Criss Jami
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 a liar who always speaks the truth.
-Jean Cocteau
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
-W. H. Auden
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
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
