All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

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.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

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.

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.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

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

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

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

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.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

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

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

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

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

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

It’s not easy to define poetry.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

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.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.

A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

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

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

The learned is happy, nature to explore; The fool is happy, that he knows no more.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Every story has its demands.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

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.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‚Read,‘ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‚Don’t read, don’t think, just write,‘ and the result could be a mountain of drivel.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

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

Why should poetry have to make sense?

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

I read poetry to save time.

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