Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

--Diane Wakoski


Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
--Robert Frost


Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

--Salvatore Quasimodo


Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

--Thomas Gray


Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the complexities of feeling at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears.

--Donald Hall