How wide is all this long pretense! There is in love a sweetness ready penned, Copy out only that, and save expense.

At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind, or left alone in its own magic hermitage.

Poetry absolves spirituality from the dividedness of religions and provides us with a sanctuary that excludes no one.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.

This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.

Of all the trees that grow so fair Old England to adorn, Greater are none beneath the Sun Than Oak, and Ash and Thorn.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.

Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep.

Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests.

Before now poetry has taken notice Of wars, and what are wars but politics Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?

A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels.

Don't saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt. For a poet with all the answers, has never yet been built.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rythymbound in poets' minds, defying time and age.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

Poetry depends on being simultaneously opaque and transparent. It can't be only one or the other. The pebble and the pool.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Poetry is the sister of Sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem.

And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

Grandfather / advised me: / Learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery.

There is nothing more poetic than the truth. He who does not see poetry in it will always be a poor versifier outside of it.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely.

My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.

Still looking for that blue jean, baby queen, prettiest girl that I ever seen. See her shake on the movie screen, Jimmy Dean.

I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

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