Poetic Composition Quotes

Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.

All good verses are like impromptus made at leisure.

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

Poetry comes fine-spun from a mind at peace.

The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.

I actually remember celebrating National Poetry Day at school; I remember having to write and read a load.

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing?

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

I discover poetry when I was in elementary school and I was so fascinated by it. Because I realised if you get the right amount of syllables and the right amount of words, in the right rhyme scheme and you put it all together. You make words just bounce of a page.

Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics

Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

I don't write, I build a rhyme.

I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

The most common time I write lyrics is the middle of the night.

The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.