Ends Quote by John Berger

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very…

— Lorraine Hansberry

The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of…

— Vernon Lee

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

— James Schuyler

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

— William Empson

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

— Pattiann Rogers

“If the impress on the imagination is that of a high poetic form it is not because the poetry is 'allegorically' imposed on the…

— Newton Arvin

Sometimes a word or an argument will trigger a poem.

— Ama Ata Aidoo

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible…

— Robert Frost

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

— Mark Strand

“Poetry is a tool for writers to create literature in different forms of expression and messages. ”

— Vanessa M. Chattman

“If we allow ourselves to be misled by the heresy of paraphrase, we run the risk of doing even more violence to the internal…

— Cleanth Brooks