A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
Quotations
Poet
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 worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
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"
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
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 more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.
-Dejan Stojanović
