Either Quote by Anonymous

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.

— Anonymous

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood?

— Pablo Neruda

I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with…

— Robert Graves

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

— Mary Oliver

Poetry is not about personal pain or tragedy. It should resonate the society's grief.

— Gulzar

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

— Felix Dennis

I don't let a poem go into the world unless I feel that I've transformed the experience in some way. Even poems I've written…

— Stephen Dunn

Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were…

— Wislawa Szymborska

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

— Sylvia Plath

I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings…

— Andrew Motion

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

— Seamus Heaney

I didn't study other poets and react against them. I kind of found them later and realised I was different. Quite throwaway, I suppose,…

— Tim Key