A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
A poem needs as well as of content.
Everyone should follow his predetermined path.
The first and the last steps on the ladder of life are the most insightful.
And remember this most of all: when it is darkest, that is when you can see the stars most clearly.
Love is love. It is God-given, and a sacrament. It is not for any man to judge.
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.
There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.
Meeks: I'll try anything once. Dalton: Except sex.
Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.
Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that poets, or writers, or whoever it was that was in ch...
Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and s...
A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody...
Songs of myself I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue. I am the poet of the w...
This constant basso on the horizon is it the waterfall or the cannon ("Poem")
Praise from your heart caresses my soul.
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
Will our lives be dull or packed with adventure?
