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
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
-Alfred De Musset
"Le Poète déchu"
Poets create gods, philosophers destroy them.
-Marty Rubin
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"
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
