A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Robert Frost
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Robert Frost
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
Rene Char
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
A poet's work is to name the unnamed able, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Samuel McChord Crothers
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Oscar Wilde
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.Charles Baudelaire
Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Thomas Gray
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
Eli Khamarov
