Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
Quotations
Poet
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
-Jean Cocteau
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
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"
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
It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.
-Dejan Stojanović
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
Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.
-Kathy Skaggs
