The vast majority of documentary evidence relating to workhouses comes from official sources. This article draws on inmates’ own writings and literary productions to offer a fresh perspective on workhouse life and re-consider the capacity of this institution to effectively silence workhouse paupers. It is indeed necessary to consider how this institution could, willingly or unwillingly, create opportunities for inmates to start writing. This article explores the specificities of inmates’ poems; how their relationship with the institution was both internalized and exploited by its residents; and how the institution could be conducive to the construction of the ‘workhouse poet’ and to the production of ‘workhouse poetry’. The aim of this study is to complexify our vision of the inhumanity of the workhouse system, without which paupers’ poems may never have been produced.