A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
--W. H. Auden
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.
--T. S. Eliot
A word is dead when it is said, some say.
I say it just begins to live that day.
--Emily Dickinson
...who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish...
--Allen Ginsberg,
Howl To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
--Walt Whitman
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
--Thomas Hardy
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
--from the movie
Arthur (1981) screenplay by Steve Gordon.