Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.

I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.

When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

My strong suits, coming from poetry, will naturally be description, which I love doing. It comes very easily, and possibly structure, up to a point.

I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrection. It's a tiny alphabet revolution. A secret. A psalm.

My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.

I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

God is the perfect poet.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he's musical because he constantly refers to settings where there's singing and dancing.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.