Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honour as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.

The palpable obscure.

It is better to be famous than notorious, but better to be notorious than obscure.