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
Quotations
Poet
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
A few moments in a poet’s company teach us more about the essence of art than many a lecture and books.
-Etinne Gilsun
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"
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
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
