Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Before you came the world was prose. Now poetry is born.
Poetry is fact given over to imagery.
I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!
[Children] use up the same part of my head as poetry does. To deal with children is a matter of terrific imaginative identification. And the children have to come first. It's no use putting off their evening meal for two months.
I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.
Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.
Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.
Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.
Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.
I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.
The truest poetry is the most feigning.
You have to understand a bit about the poetry of the blues to know where the references are coming from.
One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
The flavor of wine is like delicate poetry.
You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble