Quotes on Poetry

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

Any time is the time to make a poem.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

What I wrote all the time when I was a kid - I don't want to call it 'poetry,' because it wasn't poetry. I was not that kind of a writer. I was a rhymer. I was a fan of Dorothy Parker's, so maybe I wrote poetry to that extent, but my main focus was the humor of it, and word construction, and the slant. Your words, it's a very powerful experience.

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry... thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.

How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?