How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
You don’t make a poem with ideas, but with words.
A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
Poetry is the deification of reality.
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
There’ll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
You don’t help people in your poems. I’ve been trying to help people all my life – that’s my trouble.
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
The job of the poet is to render the world – to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
I like poems that are little games.
