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The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.