Am Quote by Seamus Heaney

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

— Paul Muldoon

“Poetry is inspired by the elements of random thoughts, an overflow of gazing at the unseen.”

— Michael Bassey Johnson

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is…

— Mark Strand

To be a poet you have to experiment.

— Matthea Harvey

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

— Charles Bukowski

The meaning of poetry has no sureness of direction; is like the sling, it is not under control.

— Rumi

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

— Laura Riding

Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the…

— Germaine Greer

It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do,…

— Ellen Glasgow

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or…

— Billy Collins

Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising…

— Joshua Reynolds

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are…

— Adrienne Rich