No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Quotations
Poet
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.
-Dejan Stojanović
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
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
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"
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
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
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
-W. H. Auden
