[The poets' role is that of] capturing on their instruments the secret stir of life in the air and giving it voice in the music of prophecy

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

I am the man devoured by longings For another incarnation, Incarnation of man.

The poet is an untier of knots, and love without words is a knot, and it drowns.

A poem is something sacred. Let no one Take it for anything except itself.

Poetry is an impassioned testament to mans inner freedom.

[Poetry] was invented by primitive man to make it easy to remember the second line; then he found a certain beauty in it.

A poem is nothing but a long word made up of syllables joined together. Syllables by themselves have no meaning. It is therefore futile to struggle with meaning in a poem.

Poetry creates an abstract world using concrete materials-just like life itself.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

Most Americans do not like poetry. We may respect it, but we do not enjoy it.

Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts. Only in writing can the cry from the great cross on Golgotha still be heard in the minds of men.

When you are describing A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things With a sort of mental squint.

Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.