By Any Other Name - Deuxieme Partie

Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
----------------------------------------------------------------Margaret Atwood


But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.
---------------------------------------------------------------- Amelia Barr


I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us, the beauty of nature, the beauty of human beings.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Ella R. Bloor

Poetry; our way back to the most private of rooms.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Marianne Boruch


Poetry is life distilled.
----------------------------------------------------------------~Gwendolyn Brooks


Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
------------------------------------------------------------------Gwendolyn Brooks


The art which uses words as both speech and song to reveal the realities that the senses record, the feelings salute, the mind perceives, and the shaping imagination orders.
------------------------------------------------------------------Babettes Deutsch


To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
-----------------------------------------------------------------~Emily Dickinson



Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Rita Dove


Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful -
---------------------------------------------------------------------Rita Dove



I'm a poet and I've read a lot of Russian poetry and can hear It's sounds. Russian poetry is so important to an understanding of the culture.
----------------------------------------------------------------Helen Dunmore


Poetry is not always words.
----------------------------------------------------------------~Audrey Foris


They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Janet Frame



None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Edith Hamilton



Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Helen Hayes


I write first drafts with only the good angel on my shoulder, the voice that approves of everything I write. This voice does'nt ask questions like, "Is this good? Is this a poem? Are you a poet?" I keep this voice at a distance, letting only the good angel whisper to me: Trust yourself. You can't worry a poem into existence.
------------------------------------------------------------------Georgia Heard



Poetic language honors polarities. We use the language of poetry to provide the many levels of feeling, facets of knowing, simultaneously, so we can examine them and move forward.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Peggy Osna Heller


To me, poetry is a marriage of craft and imagination. The making of apoem requires attention to form, sound, revision, and precision. But imagination lifts you from a lawn chair to the clouds. And this is the mystery of poetry.
------------------------------------------------------------------Christine E. Hemp


...the art of saying everything and reducing it to nothing...
------------------------------------------------------------------Barbara Hyett


It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in [the] soul.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Sofia Kovalevskaya


Poetry allows one to speak with a power that is not granted by our culture.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Linda McCarriston


Poetry; Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Marianne Moore


Writing poems can be a way of pinning down a dream (almost); capturing amoment, a memory, a happening; and, at the same time, it's a way of sorting out your thoughts and feelings. Sometimes the words tell you what you didn't know you knew.
------------------------------------------------------------------Lillian Morrison


Every poet I know - although there may be some I don't know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don't teach - tends to be just like the rest of us: just really busy, really overcommitted.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Sharon Olds


Breathe-in experience,
breathe-out poetry.
-----------------------------------------------------------------~Muriel Rukeyser


A lot of people think they can write poetry, and many do, because they can figure out how to line up the words or make certain sounds rhyme or just imitate the other poets they've read. ...
-------------------------------------------------------------------Cynthia Rylant


One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Nathalie Sarraute


The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Sonia Sanchez


With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Anne Sexton


The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Edith Sitwell


Poetry is the deification of reality.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Edith Sitwell


I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
-------------------------------------------------------------------~Edith Södergran


I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Anne Stevenson


The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Simone Veil


American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Diane Wakoski


I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, ....
---------------------------------------------------------------------Diane Wakoski


A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Beatrice Wood


The poet gives us his essence, ...
---------------------------------------------------------------------Virginia Woolf


Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
----------------------------------------------------------------------Virginia Woolf


One good way to start writing poetry is to read all kinds of poetry: not just in order to imitate but to fill up your head with it, to absorb it, to make poetry an essential part of how you view the world.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Valerie Worth