Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
Quotations
Poet
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
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"
The poet is much more the one who inspires, than the one who is inspired.
-Paul Éluard
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-H. L. Mencken
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.
-Dorothy L. Sayers
"Busman's Honeymoon"
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
