top of page
.png){kind=small}
More
"A tough life needs a tough language-and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers-a language powerful enough to say how it is."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry and I think it's nicer' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed 'to look at it through poetry."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden.Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry."
Author Name
Personal Development
"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Each day before the end of eveshe sought her lover, nor would him leave,until the stars were dimmed, and daycame glimmering eastward silver-grey.Then trembling-veiled she would appear,and dance before him, half in fear;there flitting just before his feetshe gently chid with laughter sweet:'Come! dance now, Beren, dance with me!For fain thy dancing I would see!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,-a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home."
Home
"There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply."
Poetry
"It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!"
Time
"I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about."
People
"I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop."
Reading
"My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand."
Poetry
"Many of my poems are not sexual."
Poems
"When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets."
Fact
"When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew."
Childhood
"We control the content of our dreams."
Dream
bottom of page