Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
Paul Celan

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.
Muriel Rukeyser

People can put their best poems straight onto the web.
Roger McGough

Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind's feelings, you'll survive.
Richard Eberhart

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.
Thomas Lynch

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
John Barton

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
Robert Morgan

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.
David Antin

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.
Robert Morgan

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.
Robert Morgan

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.
Wilhelm Reich

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.
Edvard Munch

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.
Mark Strand

The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs.
Henry Rollins

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.
Lactantius

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.
Peter Davison

The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue.
James Welch

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.
Robert Fitzgerald