Children delight in poetry if they are not frightened away…

I have never felt more alive than when I watched my children delight in something, never more alive than when I have watched a…

— Elizabeth Taylor

“But wasn’t that what fear was, at its essence? A direct conduit to the inner child, through all the armor and fortifications that we…

— Paul Antony Jones

The things we fear about poetry are the things that are good about poetry.

— Jake Adam York

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

— Muriel Rukeyser

I also could see myself as a stand-up comedian, a fashion designer (for people of all sizes), a hairdresser, an earnest and eventually burnt-out…

— Denise Duhamel

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