They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem… I catch them in midflight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, […]
Poetry Quotes
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.
Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.
Poets treat their experiences shamelessly; they exploit them.
Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. Let not what should be sauce, rather than food for you, engross all your application. Beware of a boundless and sickly appetite for the reading of poems which the nation now swarms withal; and let not the Circaen […]
“Look into thy heart and write!” is good advice, but not if interpreted to mean, “Look nowhere else!” The poet should know his world and, so far as his art is concerned, any kind of battering from his world is better than his own self-indulgent brooding.
I care not one single curse for all the criticism that ever was canted or decanted, or recanted. Neither does the world. The world takes a poet as it finds him, and seats him above or below the salt. The world is as obstinate as a million mules, and will not turn its head on […]
When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have else they will never have better.
In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it. Other poets take longer.
