The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
-Jean Cocteau
"Le Rappel á l'ordre"
Quotations
Poet
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-Plato
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
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
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
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'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"
