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Marilyn Hacker

"I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem."

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"I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem."

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Amber Hurdle

"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."

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Amber Hurdle

"When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses."

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Amber Hurdle

"Old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know."

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Amber Hurdle

"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry."

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Amber Hurdle

"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."

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Amber Hurdle

"From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be."

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Amber Hurdle

"In the grueling light that passed for day..."

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Amber Hurdle

"Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence."

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Amber Hurdle

"I despair of ever writing excellent poetry."

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Amber Hurdle

"The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee."

Explore more quotes by Marilyn Hacker

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Marilyn Hacker
"Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it."
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Marilyn Hacker
"The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide."
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Marilyn Hacker
"Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically."
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Marilyn Hacker
"We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies."
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Marilyn Hacker
"When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence."
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Marilyn Hacker
"I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then."
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Marilyn Hacker
"I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it."
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Marilyn Hacker
"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."
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Marilyn Hacker
"I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts."
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Marilyn Hacker
"The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity."
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