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
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
-Dudley Moore
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."
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.
-Allen Ginsberg
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
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
