If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
Wallace Stevens

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
Joyce Carol Oates

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

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
Allen Ginsberg

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
Allen Ginsberg

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
Allen Ginsberg

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

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
James Russell Lowell

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Thomas Mann

I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
Naguib Mahfouz

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
Muhammad Iqbal

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
Muhammad Iqbal

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.
Muhammad Iqbal

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
William Hazlitt

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
William Hazlitt

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
Norman MacCaig

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.
Norman MacCaig