Eeeny, Meeny, Miney...MEME

Give us at least 10 quotations pertaining to poetry - from 10 different writers &/or poets which best coincide with your philosophy vis a vis ars poetica. They can be posthumous or otherwise. The order is not important - unless it is to you.



“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.”
---------------------------------------------------------- Thomas Gray.


“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”
----------------------------------------------------------- John Cage


"What a poet keeps out of a poem is as necessary to its success as what the poet lets into it."
----------------------------------------------------------- Mary Kinzie


"If we care about readers at all (and not just those in the academy), we have to give them a way into the poem. And I think that we need to remember that clarity does not preclude depth."
------------------------------------------------------------ Claudia Emerson

“Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.”
----------------------------------------------------------- - Louis Untermeyer.


“To define what a poem is would require defining human existence. It would require answering why is there something, rather than nothing.”
------------------------------------------------------------- Charles Simic


“Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.”
-------------------------------------------------------------- Ezra Pound.


"Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination."
------------------------------------------------------------– William Carlos Williams.


“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
--------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Frost.


"You never ask a poet what he means, you tell him!"
----------------------------------------------------------------Howard Nemerov


I tag, Suzanne, Sam, Collin, Robert & Rachel.