Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.

Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

On the subject of literary genres, I’ve always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I’d love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild; In Wit a man; Simplicity, a child.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

A cherub’s face, a reptile all the rest.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I’m nobody, who are you?

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it’s poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

My fans love me for me, my beats, my rhymes.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

They might not need me; but they might. I’ll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?