“A poet who has not produced a good poem before he is twenty-five, we may conclude cannot, and never will do so.”
William Wordsworth
“The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has kinetic force, it sets in motion . . . [ellipsis in source] elements in the reader that would otherwise be stagnant.”
Denise Levertov
“It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road / the one less traveled by / offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
Rachel Carson
“We all write poems; it is simply that the poets are the ones who write in words”
John Fowles
“In your light I learn how to love.In your beauty, how to make poems.You dance inside my chest,where no one sees you.”
Jalal ad-Din Rumi
“The only gift is a portion of thyself. . . the poet brings his poem; the shepherd his lamb. . .”
