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."
Quotations
Poet
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
-Antoine De Saint Exupéry
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
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"
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
-Jean Cocteau
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
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
