Wallace Stevens

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Money is a kind of poetry.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.