A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Robert Frost

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
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 is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden

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

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
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