“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
Poetry says in twenty words what prose takes two hundred to approximate. These quotes explore the craft, the beauty, and the necessity of verse — from poets who live for it and readers who are grateful they do.
“Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”
“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
“Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.”
“Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.”
“I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.”
“I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.”
“Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!”
“A lot happens by accident in poetry.”
“I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.”
“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”
“I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.”
“Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.”
“My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.”
“Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry.”
“That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.”
“The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.”