A poem . . . begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. . . . It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. --Robert Frost: Main Page
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have. --Wallace Stevens
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy:- in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures. --George Eliot
In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself- as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony- those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself. --Joseph Brodsky
It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose. --Boris Pasternak
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child. --Carl Sandburg
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Writing Poetry
