A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does. - Robert Morgan
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle. - Edwin Hubbel Chapin
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. - Allen Ginsberg
I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic. - Thom Gunn
Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them. - Allen Tate
On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton. - Richard Serra
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have. - John Masefield
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library. - Anthony Hecht
Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time. - Christopher Fry
No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave. - Knut Hamsun
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. - Paul Dirac
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind. - Lascelles Abercrombie
In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry. - Norman MacCaig
Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess. - Robert Adamson
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime. - Robert Morgan
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly. - Frederick William Robertson
I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world. - James Laughlin
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. - John Andrew Holmes
We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible. - John Drinkwater
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese. - Lafcadio Hearn