Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen a lot of them will.

Poetry isn't a profession it's a way of life. It's an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

On July 26 1916 I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

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.

A public expectation it has to be said not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry '

I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

In the language of poetry where every word is weighed nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all not a single existence not anyone's existence in this world.

Unfortunately poetry is not born in noise in crowds or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

Everyone needs solitude especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point life itself takes over again.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

Poetry is a form of mathematics a highly rigorous relationship with words.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

For me poetry is a situation - a state of being a way of facing life and facing history.

What other people may find in poetry or art museums I find in the flight of a good drive.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry on the other hand poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.