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.

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

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

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

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

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 art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

I read poetry to save time.

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.

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

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.

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.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

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

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

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.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

I’m nobody, who are you?

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

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

It’s not easy to define poetry.

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?

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

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

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.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

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

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

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

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

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.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

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

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.

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.

In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies.

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

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

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.

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