A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.
A good poet's made as well as born.
A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.
A person born with an instinct for poverty.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
A poet can survive anything but a misprint.
A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
A poet is born not made.
A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days — but not without poetry.
As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.
As to ''Don Juan,'' confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?
Between religion's ''this is'' and poetry's ''but suppose this is,'' there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.