Writing Advice and Wisdom

Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet. From those sounds which we hear on small or on coarse occasions, we do not easily receive strong impressions, or delightful images; and words to which we are nearly strangers, whenever they occur, draw that attention on themselves which they should transmit to other things.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad — not because one is a friend but because their poems are bad.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie up again, but differently.

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

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

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and — if he is lucky enough — know the love of an honest woman.

All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose; words in their best order;—poetry; the best words in the best order.

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.