A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
Quotations
Poet
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
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 never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
-Dudley Moore
The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.
-Kathy Skaggs
