Before Quote by Brian Harris

Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new

— Rory Sutherland

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky…

— Janet Fitch

The poetry of speech.

— Lord Byron

Poetry is meant to be heard.

— Mary Oliver

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

— May Sarton

Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.

— Edward Hirsch

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

— James Fenton

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

— Howard Nemerov

Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.

— Trevor McDonald