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
Quotations
Poet
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
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"
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 must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
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"
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
