Catalyst Quote by Diane Ackerman

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

— Jane Hirshfield

Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the…

— Rollo May

I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through…

— Billy Collins

“Poetry can be a peculiar gateway, Will. It can be a way into all kinds of things that don’t seem to have a way…

— Will Willingham

“Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others.”

— Adrienne Rich

Poetry is a reaching out forward expression, an effort to find fulfillment

— Robert Frost

Poetry, which is our relation to the senses, enables us to retain a living relationship to all things. It is the quickest means of…

— Anais Nin

“it is the function of a poet to relate not things that have happened, but things that may happen,”

— Aristotle

The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is…

— Babette Deutsch

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path…

— Jane Hirshfield

Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising…

— Joshua Reynolds

“Poetry rescues things by reconciling matter and spirit in the metaphor.”

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila