Poetry makes nothing happen.

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.

[Kieran]his head propped on a stack of poetry books he'd brought from the library. Almost all of them had been inscribed on the inside cover by a James Herondale, who had neatly written out his favorite lines.

I wouldn't be surprised if poetry - poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs - is how the world works. The world isn't logical; it's a song.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Love is the poetry of the senses!

she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.

There was also something about the smell of bookshops that was strangely comforting to her. She wondered if it was the scent of ink and paper, or the perfume of binding, string, and glue. Maybe it was the scent of knowledge. Information. Thoughts and ideas. Poetry and love. All of it bound into one perfect, calm place.

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment--that explodes in poetry.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

"You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris- no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never "weeps, he knows not why." If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain ? and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

I believe in being a poet in all moments of life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behavior has nothing to do with their poetry. In other words, they are only poets when they write poetry. Then it is finished and they turn into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, shortsighted, miserable, and envious people. Well, I cannot believe their poems