I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

However I learned something. I thought that if the young person the student has poetry in him or her to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

And the second question can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

And if they haven't got poetry in them there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

All those authors there most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side that's the prose side that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals but even as I withdrew into this reading I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

That sense of a life in natural objects which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice was then in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things which ponders listens penetrates where the earlier less developed consciousness passed lightly by is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

Cut quarrels out of literature and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

The lines of poetry the period of prose and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.