I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
-Pablo Neruda
Quotations
Poet
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
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
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
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."
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
-Alfred De Musset
"Le Poète déchu"
The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.
-Jane Kenyon
It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.
-Dejan Stojanović
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"
