Believe Quote by Campbell McGrath

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

— Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions…

— Wallace Stevens

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

— Philip Larkin

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose…

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that…

— Joseph Brodsky

As I get older, I recognize that my thinking about poetry may or may not have anything actively to do with my actual work…

— Robert Creeley

There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.

— Dana Goodyear

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is…

— Mark Strand

Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.

— Robert Graves

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've always believed that poetry must speak of realities as least as complicated as those spoken of in prose. I've read books of poems,…

— Lawrence Joseph

“To me at least, poetry like love- implies a magical approach to life, quite different from the presently accepted rational way of looking at…

— Jane Roberts