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"
Quotations
Poet
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.
-Dejan Stojanović
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
-Pablo Neruda
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"
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
