Poetry is of so subtle a spirit that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language or music without atmosphere.

But poetry is a way of language it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language though so I am always aware of every word's meaning or multiple meanings.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

So I suppose poetry language the shaping of it was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

Poetry is first and last language - the rest is filler.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats almost 100 years old now and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

Still language is resilient and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong beautiful form to me and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image in its newness opens a future to language.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form and that it's timeless that it reaches back.

Poetry almost by definition calls attention to its language and form.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.