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
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
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.
-Dejan Stojanović
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
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
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
-Dudley Moore
Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.
-Allen Ginsberg
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
-Edith Södergran
