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 a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
Poets create gods, philosophers destroy them.
-Marty Rubin
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.
-Dorothy L. Sayers
"Busman's Honeymoon"
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
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's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
