Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
Every healthy man can do without food for two days — but without poetry, never!
or simply: