Best Poem Quotes

I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.

Natalie Lyalin is writing some of the best poems in the world. There is an evil in her gorgeous poem-hearts. She must have sold her heart to the devil to write like this—so beautiful, so funny and so strange. Her images stack and stack down the page without spilling, each line such a bombshell you'll start reading backward to the first line. These poems are like babies—they will pop out of trees.

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything.

People can put their best poems straight onto the web.

I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have.

The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.

A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep...

Do not go gentle into that good night.

But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

I know why the caged bird sings.

Human bodies are words, myriads of words, (In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay, Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)