In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Paul Valery

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
Paul Dirac

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
Paul Dirac

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
Lascelles Abercrombie

Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.
Lascelles Abercrombie

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
Lascelles Abercrombie

By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.
Lascelles Abercrombie

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.
Lascelles Abercrombie

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.
Lascelles Abercrombie

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.
Lascelles Abercrombie

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
Lascelles Abercrombie

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
Lascelles Abercrombie

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
Robert Adamson

Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.
Robert Adamson

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
Robert Adamson

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
Jacques Derrida

In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
Danielle Steel

Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge