Art Quote by Paul Valery

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.

— Charles Bukowski

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur…

— David Lehman

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

— Felix Dennis

“A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides…

— Terry Eagleton

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

— Umberto Eco

When poems are no good they don't make any sense.

— Derek Walcott

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

— Stanley Kunitz

A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.

— Victor Hugo

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their…

— Randall Jarrell

“A poem isn't a good poem, until you need it.”

— J. David Gray

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

— Mark Strand