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Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.

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

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others.

It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them.