George Abbershaw's prosaic mind quivered on the verge of…

It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

— Henry James

“Wait again. He was doing that fanciful thing, where he thought in poetry and looked in verse.”

— Theresa Romain

I was interested in all kinds of things, whether it be Avatar, Mad Men, Troy, 300, Battlestar Gallactica, or the poems of Horace and…

— Daniel Mendelsohn

The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains…

— James A. Garfield

All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

— Helen Vendler

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

“In the streets, the children scream, the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed,” he crooned, putting down the metal grill tongs to take my…

— Alexandria Clarke

The word 'mundane' has come to mean 'boring' and 'dull', and it really shouldn't - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes from…

— Richard Dawkins

“It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the…

— Erica Jong

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

— David Hare

“Time gives poetry to a battlefield...”

— Graham Greene

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

The name Phenomenal Woman was inspired by Maya Angelo, who wrote 'Phenomenal Woman', a favorite poem of mine.

— Meena Harris

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

— Carl Rakosi