You have to have been in love to write poetry.
The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.
Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.
Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance.
My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.
What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.
If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.
The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.
I find I cannot exist without Poetry
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision.
Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.
Writing a poem is discovering.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.
Poetry comes fine-spun from a mind at peace.
If I wanted to be Rimbaud, what was I doing in graduate school? Trying to stay out of the army, of course. Graduate study gave me a draft deferment. But I also knew I lacked erudition and polish and was often sunk in forlorn reveries.
Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.
The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.
