Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
Quotations
Poet
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
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."
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
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
-Walt Whitman
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
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
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
