Poetry Quotes

"I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that."

"One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime."

"A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does."

"We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough."

"When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on."

"I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation."

"Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later."

"The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English."

"The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end."

"Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form."

"Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry."

"Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts."

"I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale."

"Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast."

"The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry."

"What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it."

"If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable."

"Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back."

"The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times."

"Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them."

"For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts."

"It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse."

"To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential."

"However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies."

"Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry."

"There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power."

"There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry."

"True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know."

"The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new."

"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think."

"Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place."

"A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being."

"But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry."

"If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry."

"Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course."

"The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music."

"We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible."

"For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music."

"I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me."

"Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready."

"This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul."

"American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet."

"But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events."

"I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry."

"Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground."

"I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior."

"PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy."

"From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not."

"I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why."

"Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler."