To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.
If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.
Poetry has saved me on occasions when people couldn't.
Whatever you get out of poetry - take it. take it. take it. Words are better off felt than understood.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, ph...
No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
Poetry makes nothing happen.
Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love w...
I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima
Authority forgets a dying king
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them
For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its t...
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre ha...
The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.