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.

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.

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 like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

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

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

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

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.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

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.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

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

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

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 figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

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

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

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.

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

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

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

It’s not easy to define poetry.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

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 want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

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

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

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.

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

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

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

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

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

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

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