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
Quotations
Poet
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
-Alfred De Musset
"Le Poète déchu"
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
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."
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
-Jean Cocteau
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
-George Sand
Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.
-Kathy Skaggs
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"
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
-Dudley Moore
