Brushing Quote by Randall Jarrell

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

— Paul Valery

Habit has a kind of poetry.

— Simone de Beauvoir

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

— Charles Bukowski

That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive…

— Alice Oswald

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

— Anonymous

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

— Edward Dahlberg

“Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many…

— Karen Swallow Prior

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

“There's something narcissistic in the phrase "collected poems." Who's collecting them? The poem. How hard is that? That's not a real collection. Now if…

— Nicholson Baker

Where there are many beauties in a poem I shall not cavil at a few faults proceeding either from negligence or from the imperfection…

— Horace

Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.

— Cheryl Hines

“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