I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose = words in their best order - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

If the object of poetry is to make men then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

I have nothing to say I am saying it and that is poetry.

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

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others it's for others to use.

I never really liked poetry readings I liked to read poetry by myself but I liked singing chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric vast and wild.

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

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness vigor and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry.

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.

From what the moderns want we must learn what poetry should become from what the ancients did what poetry must be.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic and the idealistic not feminine.

The poetry of this one is called philosophical of that one philological of a third rhetorical and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you come and sit relax and enjoy yourself for a while.

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.

France is not poetic she even feels in fact a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.