Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
Quotations
Poet
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
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.
-Allen Ginsberg
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
-Søren Kierkegaard
"Fear And Trembling; Repetition"
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
