Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement… says heaven and earth in one word… speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
—Christopher Fry
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
—John Ashbery
It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.
—William Carlos Williams
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
—Plato
The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on.
—Emily Dickinson
This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can't put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing that you can do: you take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. Two things, not all things! That's the way the work has to go. You make connections in your work… That's what we do, we people who make things. If it's a stool or a film or a poem or an essay or a novel or a musical composition, it's all about that. Finding how it fits together and fitting it together.
—Wendell Berry
There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.
—Joy Harjo
A picture is a poem without words.
—Horace
I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
—Howard Nemerov
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
—David Carradine
Most people ignore most poetry
because
most poetry ignores most people.
—Adrian Mitchell
It's easier to quote poets than to read them.
—Allison Barrows
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
—Charles Baudelaire
The freedom of poetic license.
—Cicero
A poem is no place for an idea.
—Edgar Watson Howe