I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.

We're all moving, moving, moving. Isn't it nice?

When will government cease being a nuisance to everybody?

There is a grace of life which is still yours, my dear Europe.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

Forgive me if I sleep until I wake up.

The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

I'm one of the cliches that has grown up.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

Fact is based upon vulgar matter.

I hope you're representing the devil's advocate.

You can do anything, literally, right? That's one of the exciting possibilities of the present.

I remember way back when I was young, 10 years ago.

I am happy to have some friends here in the kitchen.

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

I'm trying to climb up both walls at once.

I was playing catch with the European audience.

This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of the water on water.

I sound like Homer. I mean Winslow Homer.

Atlantis will rise again.

We all want what's been suddenly disallowed.

This country has been unconscious, and it's got to awake. That's my belief.

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

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.