The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.

A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of Spring, love, and dogs.

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

Poetry is adolescence fermented and thus preserved.

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet s to invent what is nonexistent.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own.

The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.