The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
Quotations
Poet
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"
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
Poets create gods, philosophers destroy them.
-Marty Rubin
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
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
