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Exlpore more Poetry quotes

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

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

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

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

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

"The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee."
Explore more quotes by A. R. Ammons


"That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends."


"I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change."


"If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster."


"I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning."


"A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction."


"I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal."


"If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'"


"The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance."


"Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without."
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