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
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
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
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
-Dudley Moore
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
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
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"
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
