A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
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.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
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.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.
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 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.
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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 nearer to vital truth than history.
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.
No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
