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This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]

No one ever was a great poet that applied himself much to anything else.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie -- except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity -- it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

I have a new method of poetry: All you got to do is look over your notebooks or lay down on a couch and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries; then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each -- don't bother about sentences -- in sections of two, three or four lines each.

Between religion's "this is" and poetry's "but suppose this is," there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -- That is a life.

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -- in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.