A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.

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.

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer.

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

There are very few great poets in the world.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

... unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

Then, since all great poets are strange in their speech and actions, he must have achieved great fame, for his actions and conversations were the strangest of any man I ever knew.

Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.