Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.