“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.”
“Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.”
“Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.”
“Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky.”
“No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.”
“That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
“Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.”
“I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.”
“Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.”
“The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.”
“Poetry is the utterance of truth — deep, heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.”
“All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.”
“The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.”
“Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
“There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.”
“When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.”
“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.”
“Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.”
“It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.”
“It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.”
“The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.”
“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.”
“Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”
“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”
“Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.”
“The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.”
“Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.''”
“The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.”