Air Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

— Peter Davison

The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry…

— Herbert Read

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

— Robert Frost

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

Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.

— Stephen Sondheim

Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all…

— Lauren Oliver

It may very well be that we have entered another time when most poets will feel compelled to use poetry to stop things from…

— Matthew Zapruder

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

— James Fenton

It is poetry that changes everything.

— Bell Hooks

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that…

— Joseph Brodsky

when a poem says something that could not have been said in any other way, in music, prose, sculpture, movement or paint, then it…

— Sybil Marshall