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

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
Howard Nemerov

It's easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time.
Philip Dunne

Many of my poems are not sexual.
Thom Gunn

Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
Sharon Olds

Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them.
John Barton

My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together.
Laurence Housman

My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.
Anne Stevenson

My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.
James Broughton

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.
Rita Dove

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.
Helen Dunmore

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
Wole Soyinka

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
Sharon Olds

My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific.
Diane Wakoski

My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.
James Welch

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.
Salvatore Quasimodo

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
Horace

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.
Robert Fitzgerald

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
Marilyn Hacker

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
Hu Shih