"I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well."

~ Diane Ackerman, At age 37, looking back on two volumes of published poetry plus experiences as a teacher, cowhand and pilot, Newsweek 22 Sep 86

"I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length."

~ John Ashbery, London Times 23 Aug 84

"I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience."

~ John Ashbery, London Times 23 Aug 84

"I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places."

~ John Ashbery, London Times 23 Aug 84

"I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them."

~ John Ashbery, Quoted by John Updike NY Times 17 Aug 86

"Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another."

~ W H Auden, Newsweek 17 Mar 58

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."

~ W H Auden, NY Times 9 Oct 60

"It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it."

~ W H Auden, The Dyer's Hand Random House 68

"A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects."

~ W H Auden, Newsweek 29 Jan 68

"Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead."

~ W H Auden, NY Times 7 Aug 71

"I set the seal on a book of letters/never to be posted, ever/to the live poets of my knowing,/not all writers, yet all conscious/of the gift of the living word."

~ Bruce Beaver, Letters to Live Poets South Head Press 69

"I don't think I am any good. If I thought I was any good, I wouldn't be."

~ John Betjeman, People 2 Jul 84

"Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind."

~ Maxwell Bodenheim, Quoted in Ben Hecht's 1958 play Winkelberg

"Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them."

~ Louise Bogan, Quoted in Achievement in American Poetry: 1900-50 Regnery 51

"[Your work] is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble."

~ Louise Bogan, In letter to Theodore Roethke, quoted in Achievement in American Poetry: 1900-50 Regnery 51

"A language ... is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state."

~ Joseph Brodsky, NY Times 1 Oct 72

"For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language."

~ Joseph Brodsky, NY Times 1 Oct 72

"Bad literature ... is a form of treason."

~ Joseph Brodsky, NY Times 1 Oct 72

"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production."

~ Joseph Brodsky, NY Times 1 Oct 72

"Who included me among the ranks of the human race?"

~ Joseph Brodsky, Response when asked at a 1964 trial, "Who included you among the ranks of the poets?" quoted in NY Times 1 Oct 72

"Man is what he reads."

~ Joseph Brodsky, Quoted by Thomas D'Evelyn Christian Science Monitor 21 May 86

"Poetry lies its way to the truth."

~ John Ciardi, Saturday Review 28 Apr 62

"You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone."

~ John Ciardi, Simmons Review Fall 62

"What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down."

~ John Ciardi, Recalled on his death, NY Times 2 Apr 86

"But when the pen is in his hand he has to write by itch and twitch, though certainly his itch and twitch are intimately conditioned by all his past itching and twitching, and by all his past theorizing about them."

~ John Ciardi, Recalled on his death, NY Times 2 Apr 86

"The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed."

~ Jean Cocteau, Newsweek 7 Apr 58

"A draftsman of words."

~ E E Cummings, Self-description, NY Times 30 Oct 63

"I like the trivial, vulgar and exalted."

~ J V Cunningham, On light verse, quoted by Thomas D'Evelyn Christian Science Monitor 26 Nov 86

"[I am] an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics."

~ T S Eliot, Quoted in William Rose Benét ed Reader's Encyclopedia Crowell 65

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."

~ T S Eliot, Recalled on his death 4 Jan 65

"The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it."

~ T S Eliot, On winning Nobel Prize in 1948, recalled on his death 4 Jan 65

"[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

~ T S Eliot, Accepting Nobel Prize, recalled on his death 4 Jan 65

"All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the unvisionary language of farm, city and love."

~ Paul Engle, Life 28 May 56

"Writing is like this - you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth."

~ Paul Engle, Life 28 May 56

"But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found."

~ Paul Engle, Life 28 May 56

"Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words."

~ Paul Engle, NY Times 17 Feb 57

"Verse is not written, it is bled;/Out of the poet's abstract head./Words drip the poem on the page;/Out of his grief, delight and rage."

~ Paul Engle, A Woman Unashamed and Other Poems Random House 65

"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering."

~ Robert Frost, NY Times 7 Nov 55

"I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."

~ Robert Frost, On writing free verse, Newsweek 30 Jan 56

"Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market."

~ Robert Frost, NY Post 18 May 58

"Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things."

~ Robert Frost, NY Post 18 May 58

"If you can bear at your age the honor of being made president of the United States, I ought to be able at my age to bear the honor of taking some part in your inauguration. I may not be equal to it but I can accept it for my cause - the arts, poetry - now for the first time taken into the affairs of statesmen."

~ Robert Frost, Reply to invitation from President-elect John F Kennedy, NY Times 15 Jan 61

"I am glad the invitation pleases your family. It will please my family to the fourth generation and my family of friends and, were they living, it would have pleased inordinately the kind of Grover Cleveland Democrats I had for parents."

~ Robert Frost, Reply to invitation from President-elect John F Kennedy, NY Times 15 Jan 61

"Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation ... Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power."

~ Robert Frost, Life 1 Dec 61

"You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country."

~ Robert Frost, Atlantic Jan 62

"I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense."

~ Robert Frost, Quoted by Margaret Bartlett Anderson Robert Frost and John Bartlett Holt, Rinehart & Winston 63

"The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader."

~ Robert Frost, Quoted by Margaret Bartlett Anderson Robert Frost and John Bartlett Holt, Rinehart & Winston 63

"A poem ... begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

~ Robert Frost, Quoted in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer Holt, Rinehart & Winston 63

"[Style is] that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. ... It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward."

~ Robert Frost, Quoted in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer Holt, Rinehart & Winston 63

"I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

~ Robert Frost, Recalled on his death 29 Jan 63

"Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second."

~ Robert Frost, Vogue 15 Mar 63

"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."

~ Robert Frost, Vogue 15 Mar 63

"I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn."

~ Robert Frost, Quoted in Daniel Smythe ed Robert Frost Speaks Twayne 64

"Humor is the most engaging cowardice."

~ Robert Frost, On wit as a form of evasiveness, quoted in L R Thompson ed Selected Letters of Robert Frost Holt, Rinehart & Winston 64

"A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair."

~ Robert Frost, Quoted in Edward Connery Lathem ed Interviews with Robert Frost Holt, Rinehart & Winston 66

"[Poetry] has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time."

~ Christopher Fry, Time 3 Apr 50

"You don't go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work."

~ Phyllis Gotlieb, Quoted by Merle Shain Chatelaine Oct 72

"Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat."

~ Robert Graves, On writing novels to support his love of writing poetry, NY Times 13 Jul 58

"Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings."

~ Robert Graves, NY Times 9 Oct 60

"I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman."

~ Robert Graves, Lecture at Oxford, Time 15 Dec 61

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either."

~ Robert Graves, Quoted by Huw Wheldon Monitor Macdonald 62

"Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race."

~ Stanley Kunitz, To seminar at Manhattan's New School, NY Times 13 Oct 84

"I dream about that sometimes - and wake up screaming. With any luck they'll pass me over."

~ Philip Larkin, When asked if he thought about becoming poet laureate, recalled on his death 2 Dec 85

"I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?"

~ Philip Larkin, Recalled on his death 2 Dec 85

"Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."

~ Philip Larkin, Recalled on his death 2 Dec 85

"You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like Finnegans Wake and Picasso."

~ Philip Larkin, Quoted in George Plimpton ed Writers at Work Viking 86

"I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife."

~ Philip Larkin, Quoted by John Updike "Writers on Themselves" NY Times 17 Aug 86

"No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?"

~ C Day Lewis, "The Poet on His Work" Christian Science Monitor 24 May 66

"Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world."

~ Archibald MacLeish, "The Poet and the Press" Atlantic Mar 59

"Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there."

~ Archibald MacLeish, "The Poet and the Press" Atlantic Mar 59

"To separate journalism and poetry, therefore - history and poetry - to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge."

~ Archibald MacLeish, "The Poet and the Press" Atlantic Mar 59

"A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard - by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off."

~ Archibald MacLeish, A Continuing Journey, Essays and Addresses Houghton Mifflin 68

"I think you have to deal with the confused situation that we're faced with by seizing on the glimpses and particles of life, seizing on them and holding them and trying to make a pattern of them. In other words, trying to put a world back together again out of its fragmentary moments."

~ Archibald MacLeish, NY Times 5 Sep 68

"Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together."

~ Jacques Maritain, Quoted in Robert Fitzgerald ed Enlarging the Change: The Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism 1949-51 Northeastern University 85

"The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep."

~ Jacques Maritain, Quoted in Robert Fitzgerald ed Enlarging the Change: The Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism 1949-51 Northeastern University 85

"In the power and splendor of the universe, inspiration waits for the millions to come. Man has only to strive for it. Poems greater than the Iliad, plays greater than Macbeth, stories more engaging than Don Quixote await their seeker and finder."

~ John Masefield, NY Times 1 Jun 58

"He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline."

~ James Merrill, On deriving material for three volumes of poetry from Ouija-board sessions with a friend, quoted in George Plimpton ed Writers at Work Viking 84

"Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others."

~ Marianne Moore, Vogue 15 Aug 63

"In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity."

~ Marianne Moore, Quoted by Louis Untermeyer "Five Famous Poetesses" Ladies' Home Journal May 64

"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."

~ Pablo Neruda, On view of his childhood home of Temuco, Argentina, as he fled a new political regime in Chile, Wall Street Journal 14 Nov 85

"Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing."

~ Pablo Neruda, On view of his childhood home of Temuco, Argentina, as he fled a new political regime in Chile, Wall Street Journal 14 Nov 85

"Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the/Most beautiful thing in the world,/A limited, limiting clarity/I have not and never did have any/Motive of poetry/But to achieve clarity."

~ George Oppen, Recalled on his death 7 Jul 84

"My verses, I cannot say poems. ... I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers."

~ Dorothy Parker, Quoted in Malcolm Cowley ed Writers at Work Viking 58

"I can't write five words but that I change seven."

~ Dorothy Parker, Quoted in Malcolm Cowley ed Writers at Work Viking 58

"I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies."

~ Boris Pasternak, Speech to International Congress of Writers in 1935, recalled on his death 30 May 60

"Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades."

~ Boris Pasternak, Quoted in Life 13 Jun 60

"Even so, one step from my grave,/I believe that cruelty, spite,/The powers of darkness will in time/Be crushed by the spirit of light."

~ Boris Pasternak, From "Nobel Prize" in Selected Poems Norton 83

"In these days of nuclear energy, can the earthenware lamp of the poet still suffice? Yes, if its clay reminds us of our own. And it is sufficient mission for the poet to be the guilt conscience of his time."

~ Saint-John Perse, Accepting Nobel Prize, NY Times 11 Dec 60

"Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say."

~ Ezra Pound, Quoted in Patricia Willis ed The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore Viking 86

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own."

~ Salvatore Quasimodo, NY Times 14 May 60

"I'll die propped up in bed trying to do a poem about America."

~ Carl Sandburg, On plans for his 79th birthday, news summaries 6 Jan 57

"A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog."

~ Carl Sandburg, Describing poetry, NY Times 13 Feb 59

"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work."

~ Carl Sandburg, NY Times 13 Feb 59

"I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn't live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me."

~ Carl Sandburg, Interviewed on his 86th birthday, NY Times 6 Jan 64

"I think the Swedish Academy ... wished to manifest its solidarity with the living spirit of Greece today."

~ Giorgos Seferis, On becoming the first Greek author to win Nobel Prize, NY Herald Tribune 25 Oct 63

"For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men."

~ Giorgos Seferis, At dinner for Nobel laureates, NY Times 11 Dec 63

"Don't ask who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life."

~ Giorgos Seferis, Life 17 Jan 64

"If an ordinary person is silent, it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent, he is lying."

~ Jaroslav Seifert, On winning Nobel Prize 14 years after organizing resistance to Communist takeover of Prague, Time 22 Oct 84

"Poetry is the deification of reality."

~ Edith Sitwell, Life 4 Jan 63

"I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish."

~ Edith Sitwell, Life 4 Jan 63

"The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives" - a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world."

~ Edith Sitwell, Recalled on her death 9 Dec 64

"Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do."

~ Stephen Spender, NY Times 26 Mar 61

"I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion."

~ Stephen Spender, On turning 70, Journals 1939-83 Random House 86, quoted by R Z Sheppard Time 20 Jan 86

"Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking."

~ Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous Knopf 57

"Money is a kind of poetry."

~ Wallace Stevens, Harper's Oct 85

"Most people read [poetry] listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom."

~ Wallace Stevens, Quoted in Beverly Coyle and Alan Filreis eds Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez Feo Duke University 86

"It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms."

~ John Synge, Quoted in Christian Science Monitor 26 Feb 85

"I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression."

~ Dylan Thomas, Quoted by Constantine FitzGibbon The Life of Dylan Thomas Little, Brown 65

"A born writer is born scrofulous; his career is an accident dictated by physical or circumstantial disabilities."

~ Dylan Thomas, Quoted in Paul Ferris ed The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas Macmillan 86

"I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay."

~ Dylan Thomas, Quoted in Paul Ferris ed The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas Macmillan 86

"Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Muse. ... a matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance."

~ Louis Untermeyer, Bygones Harcourt, Brace & World 65

"There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't."

~ John Updike, Quoted by Michiko Kakutani "When Writers Turn to Brave New Forms" NY Times 24 Mar 86

"When it aims to express a love of the world it refuses to conceal the many reasons why the world is hard to love, though we must love it because we have no other, and to fail to love it is not to exist at all."

~ Mark Van Doren, On poetry and the world, The Autobiography of Mark Van Doren Harcourt Brace 58

"The poem ... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life."

~ Robert Penn Warren, Saturday Review 22 Mar 58

"The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it."

~ Robert Penn Warren, NY Times 16 Dec 69

"How do poems grow? They grow out of your life."

~ Robert Penn Warren, "Poetry Is a Kind of Unconscious Autobiography" NY Times 12 May 85

"What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography."

~ Robert Penn Warren, "Poetry Is a Kind of Unconscious Autobiography" NY Times 12 May 85

"I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan."

~ Robert Penn Warren, On being appointed first US poet laureate, Washington Post 27 Feb 86

"It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self."

~ Richard Wilbur, Accepting National Book Award, NY Herald Tribune 24 Mar 57

"To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men."

~ Richard Wilbur, Accepting National Book Award, NY Herald Tribune 24 Mar 57

"Nothing whips my blood like verse."

~ William Carlos Williams, Quoted in John Thirlwall ed The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams Astor-Honor 57

"When they ask me, as of late they frequently do, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing."

~ William Carlos Williams, Quoted in report on courses to train more sensitive physicians, NY Times 8 Apr 86

"Dance, little words, on the end of your string./I can make you do most anything I want to./I can hide, anywhere/and watch you say the things/I would never dare."

~ Helen Worley, "Puppetry and Poetry" in The Soul Survivor privately published 82

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote."

~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko, NY Times 3 Nov 63

"Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers."

~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Quote 2 Jul 67

"In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies."

~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography Dutton 63, quoted by Robert Conquest "The Politics of Poetry" NY Times 30 Sep 73

"In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable."

~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko, NY Times 2 Feb 86

"[I] do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck - and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay - and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road. That's why I like Thomas Wolfe."

~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko, NY Times 2 Feb 86

"Everything I do, I do on the principle of Russian borscht. You can throw everything into it - beets, carrots, cabbage, onions, everything you want. What's important is the result, the taste of the borscht."

~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko, NY Times 2 Feb 86