Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
Quotations
Poet
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."
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.
-Criss Jami
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"
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
-Alfred De Musset
"Le Poète déchu"
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
-Jean Cocteau
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.
-Dejan Stojanović
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
