to say one thing is simply not to say enough

Poems, if they are any good at all, hold a knowledge elusive and multiple, unsayable in any other form. Resonant, fragrant, travelling more than one direction at a time, poetic speech escapes narrowing abstraction and reification as richly as does life itself. This is why lyric poems are so rife... with irony - good poems undercut their own yearning to say one thing well, because to say one thing is simply not to say enough.

- from "Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry," by Jane Hirshfield