Quotes About Expression

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

Although you be, as I am, one of those Who feel a Christian ought to write in prose, For poetry is magic: born in sin, you May read it to exorcies the Gentile in you.

He presses my hand and he says he loves me, Which I find an admirable peculiarity.

The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.

The underlying reason for writing is to bridge the gulf between one person and another.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings..

Sorry, my dear, one mustn't be bohemian!

For love: a poet. For romance: a journalist.

For poetry makes nothing happen.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." — W. H. Auden

Whatever else it may or may not be, I want every poem I write to be a hymn in praise of the English language.

A poet […] may talk nonsense, but it will probably be interesting nonsense.

Two hundred years from now nobody will care much about our politics. But if we were truly moved by the things that happened to us, they may read our poems.

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient: I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive, which is why, perhaps, all totalitarian theories of the State, from Plato's downwards, have deeply mistrusted the arts. They notice and say too much, and the neighbors start talking.

The public will stand, nay even enjoy, a good deal of poetry.

My name on the title-page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented but near the border of sanity...

Because I love you more than I can say, If I could tell you I would let you know.