D. H. Lawrence Quotes

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

All musicians should write poetry or at least read it if they want to improve their game. Except for people who believe lyrics don't matter.

Most people who write and publish poetry teach or do something else.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

By the time I was 12, I had memorised hundreds of couplets. I could recite for hours poems written by others. I knew I could write a line in metre. But I never dared to do it till I was 33 years old.

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.