A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
I look for poetry in English because it’s the only language I read.
That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.
I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.
I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Existential philosophy, poetry and art – just like sadness – were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.
American poetry is this country’s greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.
I love romantic poetry.
When I was in fourth grade, I started writing a lot of poetry, and eventually, someone in the church was like, ‘You should switch this over to rapping.’ I went home and did that – started putting my poems over rap.
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It’s one of the great things poetry does.
Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly… in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.
What a great poem teaches you – and it’s not intellectual at all – is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.
Around 10 years old I started being into church and being around the church. I started doing poetry – I was doing all clean poetry, totally clean.
Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life – though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.
I’m very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.
Music is my thing. It’s my thing; it’s what I love. It’s what I do. It’s football to me; it’s Christmas to me; religion to me; poetry to me.
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man’s expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.
Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one’s geographic landscape, sometimes out of one’s cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
