If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society’s own equivalent of oblivion.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they’re not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they’re doing is simply talking back to the language itself — as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony — those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it’s something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a “read,” commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

We must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life, the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent.

Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Poets … are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

On Rousseau’s “Ode To Posterity”:

This poem will never reach its destination.

Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.