Animal Quote by Michael Longley

As we all know, poets are born brain-wired a certain way and every poet I know wrote as a child. I'm no exception.

— Grace Cavalieri

Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions…

— Wallace Stevens

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

— Louise Bogan

I think a lot of things that I write do have some type of message behind them, but that's not always how they're born.

— Ego Nwodim

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times…

— Billy Collins

Sometimes I am puzzling over something for months and months and the poem gets created in small bursts and rewritten a hundred times, and…

— Sarah Kay

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

— William Wordsworth

Sometimes a word or an argument will trigger a poem.

— Ama Ata Aidoo

Poetry is subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it.

— Sonia Sanchez

Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.

— Honore de Balzac

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

— Jack Prelutsky