The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
Quotations
Poet
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
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."
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
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
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
-Jean Cocteau
Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.
-Kathy Skaggs
