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"
Quotations
Poet
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
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
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
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
-Alfred De Musset
"Le Poète déchu"
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
-Edith Södergran
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"
