That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.
If you know much about your work - why you work, how you work, your aims - you are probably not a poet.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.
'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
Listen to presences inside poems, Let them take you where they will. Follow those private hints, and never leave the premises.
An architect, to be a true exponent of his time, must possess first, last and always the sympathy, the intuition of a poet... this is the one real, vital principle that survives through all places and all times.
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.
I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.
Science does not mean an idle resting upon a body of certain knowledge; it means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an end which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.
I do believe that a poet would possess a stronger intuitive sense of phrasing with a rock song. There is a way to tap into the emotions of an audience simply by the cross of a certain phrase, even a single word, against a certain chord.
The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.
In its truest manifestation, where it gives judgments, poetry is super-luxury. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a High Court judge if he were forced to follow the true poetic formula, doing the job for love, being forced into pubs for relief.
Nearly all children have a feeling for rhythm in words, for the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes. Many adults have lost this feeling and, if they read verse at all, demand a far cruder music than that which they once appreciated.
There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.
