While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice.
I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music.
It ["The Ancient Mariner"] is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland.
All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.
I read a lot of poetry. I read some history.
I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.
He that would earn the Poet's sacred name, Must write for future as for present ages.
I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.
Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.
Poetry is our heart, our spirit, our soul. Call it whatever; without it, everything else is nothing but hardware.
Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.
These Germans seem an odd race, a mixture of clay and spirit - what with their beer-drinking and smoking, and their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earth; but ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursing out in most unexpected jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus.
Every old poem is sacred.
It is poetry that changes everything.
A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.
What was love, really? Flowers, chocolate, and poetry? Or was it something else? Was it being able to finish someone's jokes? Was it having absolute faith that someone was there at your back? Was it knowing someone so well that they instantly understood why you did the things you did—and shared those same beliefs?
The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.