When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
~ T. S. Eliot
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
~ Robert Graves
There's no money in poetry but then there's no poetry in money either.
The essentials of poetry are rhythm dance and the human voice.
~ Earle Birney
Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.
~ Henry David Thoreau
A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer he approaches lucid ground warily like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
~ E. B. White
Most joyful let the Poet be it is through him that all men see.
~ William Ellery Channing
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.
~ Cyril Connolly
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
~ Wallace Stevens
A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.
~ Randall Jarrell
Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.
~ Robert Frost
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
~ Robert Penn Warren
When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.
Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.
~ J. M. Synge
No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
~ Marianne Moore
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose - words in their best order poetry - the best words in their best order.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
~ Christopher Morley
Science is for those who learn poetry for those who know.
~ Joseph Roux
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
~ George Santayana
Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.
~ William Butler Yeats
Poetry is a mug's game.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
An art in which the artist by means of rhythm and great sincerity can convey to others the sentiment which he feels about life.
~ John Masefield
Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
~ Phyllis Mcginley
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully.
~ Aristotle
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
~ Walt Whitman
Poets aren't very useful because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.
~ Ogden Nash
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.
~ Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right.
~ Rudyard Kipling
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.
~ Maxwell Bodenheim
For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
~ Sylvia Plath
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
