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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

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

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

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

A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it.

At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.