Poetry is not a career, but a mug game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written; he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
Poetry Quotes
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
God thinks within geniuses, dreams within poets, and sleeps within the rest of us.
Histories make men wise, poets witty; the mathematics subtle, natural philosophy deep; moral grave, logic and rhetoric able to contend.
Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience; which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
It is also clear that the poet’s job is not to report what has happened, but what is likely to happen: that is, what is capable of happening according to the laws of probability and necessity… the historian talks of what has happened, the poet of the kind of thing that can happen. For this […]
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
