I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.

I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.

Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do.

It's not easy to define poetry.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available.

I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.

Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.

I read poetry to save time.

Poetry is life distilled.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

I love poetry. I love rhyming. Do you know, there are poets who don't rhyme? Shakespeare did not rhyme most of the time, and that's why I do not like him.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.