Quotes About Author

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests.

I have to submit to much in order to pacify the touchy tribe of poets.

My publishers will make any kind of a beautiful book I design and send in to them, but ... For poetry they have less use than a rooster would have for skates.

I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon." Lisa Simpson

Go to hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!

Poetry contains love and holds it in high esteem, even though love always humiliates it by using it merely as a soothing after-shave lotion.

I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.

Frances Bellamy thought the changes spoiled the poetry of it. He was a pretty stern guy. Everybody has some sense of humor, but I don't think he had much.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.

Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.

Poetry is unfallen speech. Paradise knew no other, for no other would suffice to answer the need of those ecstatic days of innocence.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

I always hesitate to call myself a children's poet, and I always hesitate to call what I write for children poetry. Though a few of the verses that I've written, yes, I think they are truly poems.