A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
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
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.
-Dejan Stojanović
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.
-Dorothy L. Sayers
"Busman's Honeymoon"
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 mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.
-Jay Z
"Decoded"
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
-Dudley Moore
