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
Quotations
Poet
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
-Plato
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."
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
-George Sand
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
-Søren Kierkegaard
"Fear And Trembling; Repetition"
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
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
