For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart...

Reform and exchange in English poetry are as slow as in the British constitution itself.

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

Most people who write and publish poetry teach or do something else.

One of the important things about familiar form and metricality is that it draws attention to the physical nature of language: the spell-binding nature of it and the ceremony of articulation.

To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because...

Rupi Kaur is an author and poet who posts the most beautiful, thought-provoking excerpts on her Instagram.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).

Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.

I really liked writing rhyming poems and plays.

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.

The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young,...

I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I've always read poetry; I've always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything...

A briar rose whose buds yield fragrant harvest for the honey bee.

I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of the spheres, but of earth, subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree...

Though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find...

She is a winsome little girl. She is a handsome little girl. She is a beautiful little girl. This sweet little wife of mine.

There is a ghost That eats handkerchiefs It keeps you company On all your travels.

Silently one by one in the infinite meadows of heaven Blossomed the lovely stars the forget-me-nots of the angels.

To all to each a fair goodnight And pleasing dreams and slumbers light.

Oft when the white still dawn lifted the skies and pushed the hills apart I have felt it like a glory in my heart.