My poems come to me in images, like film. I can see it very clearly and then this overwhelming urge to write out best what I just saw comes over me…

[https://web.archive.org/web/20051123233012/http://texaschapbookpress.com/magellanslog5/Saltlick/hsinhsinming.htm The Hsin Hsin Ming (Verses on the Faith Mind) translated by Robert B. Clarke]

[http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9049584/al-Maarri Profile in Encyclopædia Britannica]

[http://www.humanistictexts.org/al_ma'arri.htm Al-Maʿarri's poems (in English)]

M. R. Kale, [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.53790/page/n235/mode/2up Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava Cantos I-VII] (Bombay: Standard Publishing Co., 1917)

I don't read poetry for pleasure. I read to be terrified in a way. And people who terrify me from their size and the grandeur of their imagination now are people like Pasternak and Neruda, a lot of Latin-American poets, Lowell - very few English poets - Ted Hughes a little...very few English poets now in fact (1968)

The most excellent of modern poets, ... whom I reverence next to Virgil.

Attar has roamed through the seven cities of love while we have barely turned down the first street.

There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

Even if you have three or four extra syllables—or as many as five or seven—you need not worry as long as the verse sounds right.

It is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ho-xuan-huong Ho Xuan Huong] at the Poetry Foundation

I am lucky not to have such bad habits. I only indulge myself in drinking wine and writing poetry. I am indeed indulgent, but what harm will that do?

[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/zamora.html PBS poetry everywhere video]

When you explain poetry, it becomes banal. Better than any explanation is the experience of feelings that poetry can reveal to a nature open enough to understand it.

[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/cecilia-vicuna Poetry Foundation page]