3 December 2020 Tahar Ben Jelloun I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that’s not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
3 December 2020 Kenny Loggins I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one’s done it this way.
3 December 2020 Havelock Ellis Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
3 December 2020 Peter Davison It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can’t do in prose.
3 December 2020 John Drinkwater Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
3 December 2020 Anna Jameson Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords – philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.
3 December 2020 Kenneth Koch I love painting and music, of course. I don’t know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I’ve certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn’t read it until I was in my late 20s.
3 December 2020 Tahar Ben Jelloun For me, poetry is a situation – a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
3 December 2020 David Antin While I’ve had a great distaste for what’s usually called song in modern poetry or for what’s usually called music, I really don’t think of speech as so far from song.
3 December 2020 Carol Ann Duffy Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
3 December 2020 David Amram That is what I did with Jack, and that’s why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.
3 December 2020 Laurie Lee What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.
3 December 2020 Marilyn Hacker When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
3 December 2020 Norman MacCaig When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can’t teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
3 December 2020 Harry Mathews Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they’re saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
3 December 2020 James Buchan Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.
3 December 2020 Edgar Allan Poe All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
3 December 2020 Richard Hell Poetry’s always dead, you know? You don’t realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.
3 December 2020 Tahar Ben Jelloun Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
3 December 2020 Pablo Neruda I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
3 December 2020 Stephen Greenblatt What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
3 December 2020 Camille Paglia I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don’t do things like that anymore – tracking words down to their roots.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
3 December 2020 Edward Dowden For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment in regarding one’s own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.
