If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
Quotations
Poet
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
-Edith Södergran
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
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 is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
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
