A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
Quotations
Poet
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
Poets create gods, philosophers destroy them.
-Marty Rubin
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'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"
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 don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
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
