Top 472 Poetry Quotes

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.