Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
A. E. Housman

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Alfred de Musset

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Oscar Wilde

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Samuel McChord Crothers