Builder Quote by Gary Snyder

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

— Mary Oliver

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

— Edward Hirsch

I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and…

— Alice Walker

Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.

— Toi Derricotte

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

— Paul Muldoon

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

— Nathalie Sarraute

“The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write,…

— W. H. Auden

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

— Paul Muldoon

It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than…

— Orson F. Whitney

Poetry is subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it.

— Sonia Sanchez

I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.

— Michel de Montaigne

There's always some reason not to be writing and I regret the times I give in to that, because then writing feels strange -…

— Joan Larkin