Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

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.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother's Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

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

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

The crown of literature is poetry.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

I like poems that are little games.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

God is the perfect poet.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

The moment of change is the only poem.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

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

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

Every single soul is a poem.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

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

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

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

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

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

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.