Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.

I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.The blessing is in the seed.

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.

The journey is my home.

I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

Exchange is creation.

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.

Editors have grown timid... a brave advance is almost inevitably followed by quick back-tracking, generally by dilution and debasement of the original intention.

I hope for quick, fluent copy and memorable pictures. The words would not 'describe' the pictures; the pictures would not 'illustrate' the words. Together, they would carry a stamp and tell a story.

I learned that I had been brought up as a protected, blindfolded daughter.

I should like to use another word: 'audience' or 'reader' or 'listener' seems inadequate. I suggest the old word 'witness,' which includes the act of seeing and knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence.

It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting - or the frame of a film - to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster.

Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.

The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.

The advertising men made it clear that there were two ways of looking at ideas in a war against fascism. Those of us who were working on the project believed ideas were to be fought for; the advertising men believed they were to be sold. The audience, those at home in wartime, were not 'citizens' or 'people.' They were 'customers.'

The town of Gauley Bridge stands as a pattern for all those places where people are linked even in the middle of their suffering, where people fight against an evil condition so that other people need not go through the same fight.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them.

However confused the scene of our life appears however torn we may be who now do face that scene it can be faced and we can go on to be whole.

Dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and indeed reality.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling . . .. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too, but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

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.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

I like poems that are complex.

'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Many of my poems are not sexual.