Popular Quotes

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.