Poetry quotes

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.