Genius Quote by Irving Layton

Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be…

— Andrew Motion

Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them…

— John Dufresne

If you like poetry let it be first rate, Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith Pope (if you will though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron,…

— Charlotte Bronte

But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

— Andrew Motion

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of…

— Philip Larkin

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great…

— Donald Hall

“On Writing Poetry: Take everyday words beyond everyday talent and write them alive.”

— C.J. Heck

Even when writing your own poems, you need to talk to people; you need to magpie around, getting words and things. I'm very against…

— Alice Oswald

Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy…

— Matthew Arnold

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

— Jay-Z

Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who…

— Anthony Hecht