Poetry is an act of peace..

It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake..

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus..

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him..

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line..

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say..

I remember when you were born, it was dawn and the storm settled near my belly. And I rolled in the grass and spit out the gas, and I lit a match and….

Oh for a seat in some poetic nook, Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!.

Poetry examines an emotional truth. It's an experience filtered through the personality of the poet. We look to poetry for visions, not scientific tr….

Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and light….

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance..

I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire, which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended with s….

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket..

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them..

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew..

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing..

If I could take your troubles I would toss them into the sea, But all these things I'm finding Are impossible for me. I cannot build a mounta….

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another..

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if ….

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven..