I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets how they've used tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

To be born in Wales not with a silver spoon in your mouth but with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul is a privilege indeed.

When I hit a block regardless of what I am writing what the subject matter is or what's going on in the plot I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why but it calms me calms my brain.

Poetry is its own medium it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense it has particular ways of catching an environment.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it it appears to be prose but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

When you're looking that far out you're giving people their place in the universe it touches people. Science is often visual so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry it touches you.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

I want a fever in poetry: a fever and tranquillity.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry I can do that.

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

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

There are men who can write poetry and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

We recognise in the finished art which is the result of these conditions the best words in the best order - poetry and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is so far as the poetry is concerned to know something that may be entertaining even delightful but is certainly inessential.

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire even though the desire be unconscious intensity of life or completeness of experience the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

If it is an imperfect word no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent be it epic or drama or narrative is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.