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Poetry is the statement of a relation
between man and the world.
-Wallace Stevens

The poetic method sees the centre of consciousness
as the point where all that is significant in the surrounding world
becomes aware and transformed.
-Stephen Spender

Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.
-Pierre-Jean Jouve

One day while studying a Yeats poem
I decided to write poetry the rest of my life.
I recognized that a single short poem has room
for history, music, psychology, religious thought,
mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's life.
-Robert Bly

Poetry is a separate language,
or more specifically, a language within a language.
-Paul Valery

Poetry is above all
a concentration of the power of language,
which is the power of our ultimate relationship
to everything in the universe.
-Adrienne Rich

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.
-Evelyn Waugh

Wouldn't it be better to turn life into poetry

rather than to make poetry from life?

And cannot poetry have as its primary objective,

rather than the creation of poems, the creation of poetic moments?

-Otavio Paz

A poet's job is to find a name for everything: 

to be a fearless finder of the names of things.

-Jane Kenyon 

To arrange words

In some order

is not the same thing

As the inner poise

That's poetry.

-Tukaram

Poetry has to be something more
than a conception of the mind.
It has to be a revelation of nature.
Conceptions are artificial.
Perceptions are essential.
-Wallace Stevens

To cast aside from Poetry,
all that is not Inspiration.
-William Blake

Poetry's magic lies in the imagery 

which satisfies even without interpretation..

it is accepted as easily as it was created.

-Robert Bridges

Poetry is the tunnel
at the end of the light.
-J. Patrick Lewis

Any time is the time to make a poem.
-Gertrude Stein

When you've got it,
there's no place for it but a poem.
-Wu Pen

All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner;
it is supposed to make us aware
of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in;
we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have 

that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, 

to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, 

that people cannot live without it.

-Jane Kenyon 

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling
that the poet believes to be interior and personal
but which the reader recognizes as his own.
-Salvatore Quasimodo

You have to follow where the poem leads.
And it will surprise you.
It will say things you didn't expect to say.
And you look at the poem and you realize,
'That is truly what I felt.' 'That is truly what I saw.'
-Philip Levine

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium 

somewhere between music and speech.

-May Sarton

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.
-Paul Valéry

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
-Marianne Moore

Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words
or even a corralling of live ones.
-Theodore Roethke

You're given the form
but you have to write the sonnet yourself.
What you say is completely up to you.
-Madeline L'Engle

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us
to convert ordinary materials into gold.
-Anais Nin

The poets makes silk dresses
out of worms.
-Wallace Stevens

Poetry is a mirror 

which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is the job of poetry 

to clean up our world-clogged reality

by creating silences around things.

-Stephane Mallarme

Poetry heals the wounds
inflicted by reason.
-Novalis

Poetry is a means of redemption.
-Wallace Stevens

It is important for the poet not to be emotional
because you cannot see clearly with tears in your eyes.
-Billy Collins

A poet who knows what it is he wants to say
may be sure it's been said already.
-Hugh Kenner

Poets don't have an 'audience'.
They're talking to a single person all the time.
-Robert Graves

Every poet has his dream reader:
mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna
like bacchics and choriambs.
-W. H. Auden

If a poet interprets a poem of his own
he limits its suggestibility.
-William Butler Yeats

My poems mean
what people take them to mean.
-Paul Valery

Modern poets mix a lot of water with their ink.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Let your poem be kept nine years.
-Horace