Poetry is the deification of reality.

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... but I am too busy thinking about myself.

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.

Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation they do not want to attract attention.

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

Still falls the rain - dark as the world of man, black as our loss - blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.

Winter is the time for comfort for good food and warmth for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire it is the time for home.

When we think of cruelty we must try to remember the stupidity the envy the frustration from which it has arisen.

I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty. But I am too busy thinking about myself.

Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.

Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints Of tentative and half-soiled tints.

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.

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.