A tune that one has once heard and liked [that] seems to haunt the mind and will not be dismissed until entirely mastered.

How perilous is it to choose / not to love the life we're shown? -- 'The Badgers,' Seamus Heaney

I write because my ink must flow like blood. The written must be spoken. Patience Agbabi

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'Ode to a Skylark'

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree. Gerard Manley Hopkins

Logical argument is what destroys poetry because poetry is beyond logic. - Robert Graves

I, too, sing America. - 'I, Too', Langston Hughes

With a lyric poem, you look, and meditate, and put the rock back. With fiction you poke things with a stick to see what will happen. - Margaret Atwood