For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one's poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community.

I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

There's a whole stereotype of the jazz musician that's into poetry and reading and metaphysics and all that stuff. Really, it's a sign of someone who's searching, whose mind is open, looking for answers. Whatever ideas you may come up with, the beautiful thing is the search.

Science is not addressed to poets.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.

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.

I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.

Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.

I always loved writing, be it creative writing for school or just poetry. I just loved writing, and in college, I started really trying to write songs and was copying other artists, just to figure it out - but I think freshman year of high school is when I realized, 'I want to be a writer. I have something to say.'

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.

I love Roald Dahl, Sharon Olds, Nizar Qabbani, who is a poet, and Junot Diaz.