Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
-Edmund Burke
Quotations
Poet
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.
-Kathy Skaggs
A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.
-Criss Jami
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
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"
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
-Jean Cocteau
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
-W. H. Auden
"The Dyer's Hand"
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
-Dudley Moore
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
-W. H. Auden
