I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.
There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.
My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.
Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.
One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
To delight the ear and the eye is a mere sensual indulgence;—true poetry strikes at the soul.
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.
