“Great poets are great copy editors.”
Life Is Poetry http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/life-is-poetry/
From the poems written in English
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Dejan Stojanovic 278
poet, writer, and businessman 1959Related quotes

“To have great poets,
there must be great audiences.”

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 20

“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
This is a favorite phrase of Jobs, but he is (mis)quoting Pablo Picasso. "Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal" is similarly attributed to Igor Stravinsky, but both sayings may well originate in T. S. Eliot's dictum http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Wood/Philip_Massinger: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn."
Misattributed

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
Compare: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." T. S. Eliot, in Philip Massinger, in The Sacred Wood (1920)
Disputed

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: I thought of all those wise men, poets, artists before me who had suffered, wept, and smiled on the road to truth. I thought of the Latin poet who wished to reassure and console men by showing them truth as unveiled as a statue. A fragment of his prelude came to my mind, learned long ago, then dismissed and lost like almost everything that I had taken the pains to learn up till then. He said he kept watch in the serene nights to find the words, the poem in which to convey to men the ideas that would deliver them. For two thousand years men have always had to be reassured and consoled. For two thousand years I have had to be delivered. Nothing has changed the surface of things. The teachings of Christ have not changed the surface of things, and would not even if men had not ruined His teachings so that they can no longer follow them honestly. Will the great poet come who shall settle the boundaries of belief and render it eternal, the poet who will be, not a fool, not an ignorant orator, but a wise man, the great inexorable poet? I do not know, although the lofty words of the man who died in the boarding-house have given me a vague hope of his coming and the right to adore him already.

"A mysterious message millionaire" in China Daily (12 January 2009) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2009-01/12/content_7388202.htm
“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 66
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“I believe that only poetry counts… A great novelist is first of all a great poet.”