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"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants."
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"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In the grueling light that passed for day..."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem."
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Personal Development
"I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream."
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Personal Development
"Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,But never will be sung to us again,Is they remembrance. Now the hour of restHath come to thee. Sleep, darling: it is best."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one."
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"Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it."
Thought
"Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time."
Time
"Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?"
Work
"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants."
Poetry
"The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case."
Fact
"When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats."
Influence
"I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us."
Art
"History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without."
History
"I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks."
History
"I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try."
Poems
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