Poetry is a matter of life not just a matter of language.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language or music without atmosphere.

But poetry is a way of language it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.