When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

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 didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.

You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.

In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.