'Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.' 

'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.'

'Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.' 

'Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.'

'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.' 

'No man can read Hardy's poems collected but that his own life, and forgotten moments of it, will come back to him, in a flash here and an hour there. Have you a better test of true poetry?' 

'Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.' 

'Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realising that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions.' 

'Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.'

'Poetry fettered fetters the human race.'

'The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given , the emotion is immediately evoked.'

'Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.'

'The poet is the priest of the invisible.'

'The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.'

'I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.'

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

'If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.'

'Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.'

'Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.'

'Poets aren't very useful. / Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.'

'Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.'

'Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.'

'In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes.'

“I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist.”

“Good poetry begins with seeing increasingly clearly, in increasingly various ways; but another part of poetry’s true perception is found only in relinquishing more and more of the self to more and more of the world.”

“What then is important in contemporary women’s poetry? What follows from women’s cultural marginality and their equivocal relation to a canon that they appropriate, resist, and transform? First of all, there is the discovery that marginality, however painful, may be artistically useful.”

“Know that everything you write begins with one word haltingly followed by another—a profoundly pathetic lack of rhythm. Often not even an image stays intact. And you call yourself a writer? But let it live on the page for a while, even a couple of years, if that’s what’s needed, and the dusty fragment of an idea will take shape. The ineffable ring. What made you willing to scribble down the code with no way to decipher it—until something else came along.”