The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
Quotations
Poet
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
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
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
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
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
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
