The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
--
The Independent on Sunday June 24, 1990.James Fenton
When a poet is being a poet that is, when he is writing or thinking about writing he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. If the poem is to turn out well, the poet cannot have thought of whether it will be saleable, or of what its effect on the world should be; he cannot think of whether it will bring him honor, or advance a cause, or comfort someone in sorrow. All such considerations, whether silly or generous, would be merely intrusive; for, psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself.
Richard Wilbur
Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
Henry David Thoreau
All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own."
Basil Bunting
There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified more supremely noble than this very poem this poem per se this poem which is a poem and nothing more this poem written solely for the poem's sake.
Edgar Allan Poe
The story of The Libertines starts for me when it was me, Carl Barβt and Steve Bedlow sat on the side of a canal, throwing stones at a bottle and we had a game where whoever hit the bottle first with the stone got to choose the name of the band - I can't even remember who it was that hit the bottle but, yeah, from that night onwards we became The Libertines. We ended up throwing ourselves into eternity, as we called it at the time
Peter Doherty
Fenton, James
Feodorov, Leonid
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