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
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
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."
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
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
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
-Edith Södergran
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
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
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
