The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
Quotations
Poet
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."
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
-Alfred De Musset
"Le Poète déchu"
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
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
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
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
