Robert Frost

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

Paul Valery

"A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself."

E. M. Forster

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

Oscar Wilde

"A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring."

E. B. White

"A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland."

Kahlil Gibran

"A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman."

Wallace Stevens

"A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof."

Rene Char

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."

Salman Rushdie

"A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose."

Samuel McChord Crothers

"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses."

Jean Cocteau

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

Oscar Wilde

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

Charles Baudelaire

"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie."

Jean Cocteau

"Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content."

Alfred de Musset

"Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure."

A. E. Housman

"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry."

Gustave Flaubert

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

T. S. Eliot

"God is the perfect poet."

Robert Browning

"He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise."

Oscar Wilde

"He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life."

George Sand

"I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world."

Russell Baker

"I've written some poetry I don't understand myself."

Carl Sandburg

"If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone."

Thomas Hardy