Traditional matter must be glorified since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things the listeners we must remember needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet and he would set out in conscious determination on an epic poem.

Everything is complicated if that were not so life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

I have written some songs but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for like a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time because I'd rather be doing other things like knitting.

Well I still write poetry but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose = words in their best order - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness vigor and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

Poetry is a sword of lightning ever unsheathed which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

It's true you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.