Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

It doesn't seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.

Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

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

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

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

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.