All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
Quotations
Poet
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
-Jean Cocteau
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
-Alfred De Musset
"Le Poète déchu"
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"
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
