Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you come and sit relax and enjoy yourself for a while.

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.

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.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

Poetry is the work of poets not of peoples or communities artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Poetry even when apparently most fantastic is always a revolt against artifice a revolt in a sense against actuality.

Poetry is a sword of lightning ever unsheathed which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

All one's inventions are true you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred and when they meet upon the same road one of them has to give place.

As an actor there is room for a certain amount of creativity but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina skill or ability to write a novel but I'd love to write short stories and poetry because those are my two passions.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

When truth has no burning then it is philosophy when it gets burning from the heart it becomes poetry.