I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
Pablo Neruda

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
Carl Sandburg

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Carl Sandburg

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg

The crown of literature is poetry.
W. Somerset Maugham

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Carl Sandburg

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
Antonin Artaud

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
Marilyn Hacker

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Marilyn Hacker

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.
Marilyn Hacker

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
John Cage

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine

It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.
Peter Steele

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
Allen Ginsberg