A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

I like poems and keep sharing them online.

Solitude favors the original, the daringly and otherworldly beautiful, the poem. But it also favors the wrongful, the extreme, the absurd, and the forbidden.

The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems

Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems

They put arsenic in his meat And stared aghast to watch him eat; They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up.

We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there’s an end of May.

Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I knew all her ways.

A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading

Ginsberg’s Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady

I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven’t in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there.

Does it mean this, does it mean that, that’s all anybody wants to know. I’d say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it’s there

You’ve often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

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.

Writing a poem is discovering.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.

You can’t criticize Bob Dylan’s singing. You have to respect Billy Joel as a brilliant poet. You can’t tell me there’s a better rock band ever than Led Zeppelin. And if you speak during the Eagles’ “Last Resort,” we’re done. I’m just asking for seven minutes. This stuff really matters, you know.

I’ve got magic. I’ve got poetry at my fingertips.

omeday, I’m gonna write a poem in a letter; Someday, I’m gonna get that faculty together.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

We are too late for the gods and too
Early for the being. Being’s a poem,
Just begun, is man.

You yourself must strive. The Buddhas only point the way.

A poem is a naked person….Some people say that I am a poet.

Reason’s whole pleasure, all the joys of sense, lie in three words: health, peace, and competence

The Boys and the Frogs SOME BOYS, playing near a pond, saw a number of Frogs in the water and began to pelt them with stones. They killed several of them, when one of the Frogs, lifting his head out of the water, cried out: “Pray stop, my boys: what is sport to you, is death to us

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

The Uses Of Sorrow (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.