I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

I'm about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don't know if anybody wants to read it. It's on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, 'Okay, that's another one.' They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.

One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.

In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.