"When power corrupts, poetry cleanses." John F. Kennedy

"A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor." Jorge Luis Borges

"Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality--thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard." Nelson Mandela

"The man is either crazy or he is a poet." Horace

"Poetry is the Devil's wine." St. Augustine

"Every man is a poet when he is in love." Plato

"It seems that God took away the minds of poets that they might better express His." Socrates

"The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born." W.H. Auden

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting . . . . A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom." Robert Frost

"It is easier to write a mediocre poem than to understand a good one." Montaigne

"We need more plumbers and electricians that we need poets--but we need poets, too. From what I read in newspapers and magazines, there are more bad poets than bad electricians and plumbers. Maybe poets ought to be licensed." Andy Rooney

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." Oscar Wilde

"I can understand your wanting to write poems, but I don't know quite what you mean by 'being a poet'" T.S. Eliot

"Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." Don Marquis (1878-1937)

"Poetry is mostly hunches." John Ashbery

"Simonides calls painting silent poetry, and poetry speaking painting." Plutarch

"Poetry is news that stays news." Ezra Pound

"Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise." Kenneth Koch

"Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page." Li-Young Lee

"In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind." Marrianne Moore

"The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not." Li-Young Lee

"Something should always change in a poem. The persona should learn something." James Tate

"All poetry comes from repetition." Kenneth Koch

"All poetry is experimental poetry." Wallace Stevens

"You don't organize metaphors . . . you explode them." Ray Bradbury

"The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem." Li-Young Lee

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned." Paul Valery

"Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive." Archibald MacLeish

"Every poem, formal or free, has an ideal shape, and the job of the poet is to find it." Peter Meinke

"I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading." Philip Larkin

"I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down." Robert Frost

"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat." Robert Frost "The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race." Karl Shapiro

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." T.S. Eliot

"You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it." Kenneth Koch

"Poetry is the only art people haven't yet learnt to consume like soup." W.H. Auden

Of a poetry reading: "The audience swelled to six in the end and we all huddled in a corner." P.J. Kavanagh