I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

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

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I love movement. I love moshing.

Don’t run if you can walk. Don’t walk if you can stand. Don’t stand if you can sit. Don’t sit if you can lie down.

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.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

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

I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don’t doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

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.

Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

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.

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

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

I’m not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

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.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

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.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

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

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Help others and give something back. I guarantee you will discover that while public service improves the lives and the world around you, its greatest reward is the enrichment and new meaning it will bring your own life.

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

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

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

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

It’s a rather rude gesture, but at least it’s clear what you mean.

I’m not trying to be sexy. It’s just my way of expressing myself when I move around.

Digital technology is the same revolution as adding sound to pictures and the same revolution as adding color to pictures. Nothing more and nothing less.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

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

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

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

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

Whatever position I occupied, it was the result of colleagues – of my comrades in the movement – who had decided in their wisdom to use me for the purpose of focusing the attention of the country and the international community on me.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

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

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

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 always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

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.

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

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