You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears…

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

— Tony Harrison

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work…

— Helen Vendler

“The wind you hear is the birth of memory when the moment hatches in time’s womb there will be no art talk. The only…

— Keropatse Kgositsile

“Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is…

— David Patterson

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

— Octavio Paz

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

— Cecil Day-Lewis

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

— Virginia Woolf

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in…

— Edward Hirsch

There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that ,…

— W. H. Auden

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them,…

— Robert Graves

“This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of…

— Henry David Thoreau

“Without pain, poetry is not possible.”

— seerat

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the…

— Washington Irving

A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the…

— Samuel R. Delany

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

— Carl Rakosi