Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and…

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

— Jeanette Winterson

In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but…

— Donald E. Westlake

Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.

— Julian Jaynes

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins…

— Tracy K. Smith

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form'…

— James Fenton

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that…

— James Fenton

“The movement Of the body is Where poetry Begins”

— Clint Catalyst

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible…

— Robert Frost

Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin…

— Eavan Boland

Poetry is the memory of language

— Jacques Roubaud

Poetry is the dark side of the moon,

— Charles Wright

As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of…

— Goldwin Smith

All poetry is misrepresentation.

— Jeremy Bentham

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is…

— Adrienne Rich

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early…

— Umberto Eco