A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.   

                                  —Rene Char

Poetry is the deification of reality.                 —Edith Sitwell

The poet judges not as a judge, but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.

                          —Walt Whitman

You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.             

                                —John Ciardi

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

                          —G.K. Chesteron

A poet’s hope: to be / like some valley cheese / local, but prized elsewhere.        

                               —W.H. Auden

In science, one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite. —Paul Dirac

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.        

                        —Adrian Mitchell

Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

                    —Marianne Moore’s

                       definition of poetry

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.            —W.B. Yeats

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.              —John Cage

The only problem / with Haiku is that you just / get started and then  —Roger McGough

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

                              —Robert Frost

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

                                    —T.S. Eliot

A poem should not mean / But be.  —Archibald MacLeish