The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
George Santayana

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
W. H. Auden

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
W. H. Auden

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden

It's 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

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

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
W. H. Auden

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

There exist only three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.
Charles Baudelaire

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Charles Baudelaire

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
Charles Baudelaire

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.
Ken Kesey

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
Thomas Hardy

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
John Updike

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
Emile Zola

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.
Philip Pullman

These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can't live with them, or without them.
Aristophanes