The only problem with Haiku is that you just get started and then
T. S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T. S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.
Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.
Poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind, or left alone in its own magic hermitage.
She has something to say about what life is like-which is all we ask of poetry.
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope.
To break the pentameter, that was the first heave
Poetry deserves the honor it obtains as the eldest offspring of literature, and the fairest. It is the fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty and color, which differ with the soil that receives and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it comes up the rose of Hafiz; in England, the many-blossomed tree of Shakespeare.
I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry
Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter.
I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.
Poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land.
Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
