If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.
Poetry Quotes
An artist that works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who molds his thoughts in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody’s use, and glorify them by his handling.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Good poets write poems that correspond with how they themselves talk; or, at least, how they would talk if they had the perfect gift of extemporary speech; they avoid inversions, oddities and rhetoric, and coin a striking phrase only when it is forced from them. If a poet, called upon to read his poems, chants […]
Poets are never young in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far off whispers of eternity, which courser souls must travel toward for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them.
Formerly, people believed that the sugar cane alone yielded sugar; nowadays it is extracted from almost anything. It is the same with poetry. Let us draw it, no matter whence, for it lies everywhere, and in all things.
A Poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don’t let them go, don’t publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
If I were a literary Pope sending out an Encyclical, I would tell these inexperienced young persons (who have literary aspirations) that nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment… Nobody except editors and school teachers and here and there a literary man knows how common […]
Read out my words at night, alone: I was a poet, I was young.
