Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau:
(Maisons-Laffitte, July 5, 1889 – Milly-la-Forêt, October 11, 1963).
French poet, novelist, playwright, designer, and filmmaker.
Although Cocteau was active in several fields, he considered himself a poet first and foremost and that all his work was poetry, whether it was a novel, a film, a play, or a painting. Cocteau was one of the most important figures in Surrealism. His work had a significant influence on many artists, including the famous composers of Les Six. His best-known works are the book Les Enfants terribles (1929), the play Les parents terribles, and the film La Belle et la Bête (1946).
The extreme limit of wisdom is what the public calls madness.
The poet is a liar who always tells the truth.
“to lie” = the use of fiction, imagination, metaphor, exaggeration, and symbolism. “The truth” = a deeper, existential, or emotional insight that is not literally, but strikingly true. Core idea: Poetry invents forms to reveal a truth that is difficult to grasp with mere factual language. Origin: Classical roots: In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that poetry is “more philosophical” than history because it touches upon the universal and essential rather than merely the particular. This idea underlies this paradox. Modern formulation: The well-known version is closely related to (and often reduced in Dutch to) Jean Cocteau’s statement: “Le poète est un menteur qui dit toujours la vérité.” Loosely translated: “The poet is a liar who always tells the truth.” In Dutch, this became succinctly: “Poets lie the truth.”
