Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and…

I hate that everybody I fuck wit in jail.

— Webbie

“Poetry is not business as usual.”

— Judith Fitzgerald

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

— Mary Oliver

The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances.

— Samuel Johnson

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry,…

— T. S. Eliot

The business of the poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not the individual, but the species.

— Samuel Johnson

I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when…

— Philip Larkin

Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our…

— Richard M. Weaver

“The poet is just like the fabled hunter who naps beside a tree, waiting for hares to break their skulls by running headlong into…

— Gu Cheng

The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is…

— Norman Cousins

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

“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