Poetry is mostly hunches.

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

... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps…

— Adrienne Rich

Poetry is like walking along a little, tiny, narrow ridge up on a precipice. You never know the next step, whether there's going to…

— Josephine Jacobsen

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed…

— Matthew Arnold

I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that…

— Billy Collins

Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

— Mary Oliver

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

— Jeremy Bentham

The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.

— Wendy Cope

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.

— Oscar Wilde

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

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body,…

— Ted Hughes