Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
Quotations
Poet
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
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
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"
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
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."
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
