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Poetry Quotes
"I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry."
21
"I came to pen another poem for you, but even every unwritten poem is you."
21
"What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it."
19
"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think."
19
"With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem."
19
"From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose."
19
"Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness."
19
"PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy."
18
"Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence."
18
"The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English."
18
"Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away."
18
"Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words."
18
"I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to."
17
"Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there."
17
"So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse."
16
"And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so."
16
"I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me."
16
"I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry."
16
"In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem."
15
"A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being."
15
"Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved."
15
"Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world."
15
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