The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

I can understand your wanting to write poems, but I don't quite know what you mean by "being a poet."

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.

When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.