Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~Percy Shelley
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. ~E.B. White
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~Robert Frost
The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. ~Robert Frost
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. ~Dylan Thomas
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. ~Pablo Neruda
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows. ~Edmund Burke
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. ~T.S. Eliot
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~Sainte-Beuve
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay
The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. ~Richard Rosen
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats
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
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
Rene Char
God is the perfect poet. Robert Browning
