Ends Quote by Robert Graves

A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.

— Robert Graves

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

— T. S. Eliot

“Poetry should forever be becoming and never perfected.”

— Friedrich Schlegel

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something…

— Anonymous

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way…

— Dorianne Laux

Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.

— C. K. Williams

Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in…

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of…

— Philip Larkin

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer…

— Ezra Pound

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

— Anonymous

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.

— T. S. Eliot

Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can't tolerate poets because - it isn't that…

— Derek Walcott