To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
Quotations
Poet
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
When a poet speaks to his own people, the voices of all other poets of other languages who have influenced him are speaking also.
-T. S. Eliot
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
