If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.
-Dejan Stojanović
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.
-Criss Jami
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
-Pablo Neruda
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn