No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Quotations
Poet
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
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."
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
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
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 don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
-Antoine De Saint Exupéry
