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I find it impossible to think of "favorite" poets. I would rather list the ones I cannot stand.

— Billy Collins Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry (2004)

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Poetry

More quotes by Billy Collins

You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and — somehow — the wine.

But tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

It is important for the poet not to be emotional because you cannot see the world clearly with tears in your eyes.

Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry (2004)

Wars begin through greed and vanity and are continued through the insanity of nationalism in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry (2004)

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Billy Collins (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.