A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
Quotations
Poet
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
-Jean Cocteau
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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'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"
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
-George Sand
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
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
The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
