Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image in its newness opens a future to language.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form and that it's timeless that it reaches back.

Poetry almost by definition calls attention to its language and form.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

On July 26 1916 I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

In the language of poetry where every word is weighed nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all not a single existence not anyone's existence in this world.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.