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
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
-Dudley Moore
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
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
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
Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.
-Allen Ginsberg
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
