Poetry Quotes

There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is the most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.

A bird half wakened in the lunar noonSang halfway through its little inborn tune.

A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.

The footpath down to the well is healed.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orch-ard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night.

The sweet of bitter barkAnd burning clove.

The question that he frames in all but words is what to make of a diminished thing.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart In that vanished abode there far apart.

Two such as you with such a master speed,Cannot be parted nor be swept away.

She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Poetry is play. I'd even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.

Not yesterday I learned to know,The love of bare November days,Before the coming of the snow.

I end not far from my going forth,By picking the faded blue;Of the last remaining aster flower,To carry again to you.

Summoning artists to participate, In the august occasions of the state; Seems something artists ought to celebrate,Today is for my cause a day of days.

That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather.

The hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength. To feel the earth as rough to all my length.