Poetry Quotes

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.

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.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

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.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

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.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.