"Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, 'Wolf, wolf,' and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born - the tall story had been born in the tall grass." - Vladimir Nabokov
"You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick...You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps...so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in." - Dylan Thomas
"The poem...is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life." - Robert Penn Warren
"Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of 'communication'; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds." - Joyce Carol Oates
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