A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Robert Frost
A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
Douglas Dunn
A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.
Thomas Harrison
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 poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
Anne Stevenson
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'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
