I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality the death of poetry and the death of a dream.

My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice exploitation humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions but to use the ordinary ones and in working them up into poetry to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

I think that there is nothing not even crime more opposed to poetry to philosophy ay to life itself than this incessant business.

My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.

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

Yet it is true poetry is delicious the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Poetry a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

It's just poetry beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them or to use words like beauty excellence art poetry with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract to express it in the most general terms to find some universal formula for it.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes not at all.