Believe Quote by Mark Strand

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

— Carol Ann Duffy

I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions…

— Michael Longley

Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.

— J. Patrick Lewis

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

Every poem, formal or free, has an ideal shape, and the job of the poet is to find it.

— Peter Meinke

The shape that poems make in the mind is an echo of something powerful in the cosmos. I do believe that, and that is…

— Campbell McGrath

“The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in…

— Robert Hass

In many ways, I feel like the form carries so much of the weight in a poem, obviously. But I think we sometimes forget…

— Kevin Young

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

— Robert Morgan

The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as…

— Kevin Young

I believe the poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.

— Alice Oswald

As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition'…

— Philip Larkin