I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.