"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think."
"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."
Oscar Wilde on Poetry"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."
Oscar Wilde on Poetry"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."
T. S. Eliot on Poetry"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."
Robert Frost on Poetry"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
Robert Frost on Poetry"The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times."
"Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast."
"The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new."
"Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques."
"In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out."