From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
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.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
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.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.
Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
