Deliberate Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

“The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day…

— John Ciardi

The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a…

— May Swenson

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

— Oscar Wilde

I do think the author ought to be able to give a good reason for the way things are in his poem. Not a…

— James Dickey

A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost…

— Michael Longley

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most…

— Jane Hirshfield

It is not enough for poems to be fine; they must charm, and draw the mind of the listener at will.

— Horace

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not…

— Seamus Heaney

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance…

— Matthew Arnold

Good acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood.

— Albert Einstein

“Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of…

— Philip Larkin

“Poetry is man’s best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions.”

— John Ciardi