A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.
Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
I am for poetry that is admired by peasant and aristocrat alike.
Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.
My wife has been my greatest earthly inspiration. She excels in eloquence, the poetry of words, empathy and graciousness.
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.
The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.
I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.
One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.
One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.
