Why need every honest poet be suspected of leading a quadruple life? Sometimes the second or third meaning is less interesting than the first, and the only really difficult thing about a poem is the critic’s explanation of it.
Poetry Quotes
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
It is also clear that the poet’s job is not to report what has happened, but what is likely to happen: that is, what is capable of happening according to the laws of probability and necessity… the historian talks of what has happened, the poet of the kind of thing that can happen. For this […]
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
We feel that this state and indeed this nation and this world is desperately in need of the deepest and most profound human values that poetry can teach. That is what Keats and Du Bois called for the poet to do, to bring Truth and Beauty. To be like the most ancient paradigmythic image of […]
In his poetry as well as in his life Shelley was indeed ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel’, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.
I’ve read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.
