I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.
Anne Stevenson

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.
Peter Davison

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
John Barton

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.
Jack Prelutsky

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
Carl Sandburg

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
June Jordan

I'm terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems.
Roger McGough

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
Story Musgrave

I've always thought my poems told stories.
Douglas Dunn

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.
Marilyn Hacker

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.
Howard Nemerov

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.
Sherman Alexie

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.
Thomas Lynch

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.
Peter Davison

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.
Peter Porter

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
Muriel Rukeyser

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.
Jason Newsted

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.
John Drinkwater