I didnt want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months. – Tom Wesselmann
I dont know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion. – Zona Gale
A poet is someone who is astonished by everything. – Anon.
I dont see how poetry can ever be easy… Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it. – Edward Abbey
A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically. – Diane Ackerman
Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully. – Aristotle
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us. – Antonin Artaud
I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true. – W. H. Auden
Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying. – W. H. Auden
As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend ones language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence. – W. H. Auden
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of mans body. – Francis Bacon
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. – Russell Baker
Ive read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free. – John Barrymore
The poet is like the prince of clouds Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer; Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers, His giant wings prevent him from walking. – Charles Baudelaire
People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I – Harold Bloom
