Books Quote by Jean Cocteau

Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My…

— Mahmoud Darwish

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

— Seamus Heaney

Part of what I try to do in schools is take poetry off of a pedestal and make it a little more accessible and…

— Sarah Kay

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

— C.J. Heck

One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind:…

— James Agee

Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

— Clive James

A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity

— James Russell Lowell

“It’s a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It…

— Jason Fried

There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.

— Edward Hirsch

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has…

— Kathleen Norris

This, in the end, might be the greatest social good of poetry: to get us to live differently, with a different sort of thinking…

— Matthew Zapruder

Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or…

— Marvin Bell