3 December 2020 Kenneth Koch I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader… I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice… mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
3 December 2020 Jean Cocteau A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
3 December 2020 Hu Shih On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
3 December 2020 Juan Ramon Jimenez Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
3 December 2020 Rita Dove Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
3 December 2020 Norman O. Brown Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.
3 December 2020 Paul Muldoon One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
3 December 2020 Simon Callow Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There’s huge, visionary poetry in it.
3 December 2020 Maxine Hong Kingston Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
3 December 2020 Anna Quindlen There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
3 December 2020 John Fowles We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
3 December 2020 Flea All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it’s another world. It’s filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers – all kinds of people.
3 December 2020 Dylan Walsh My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.
3 December 2020 Matthew Arnold Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
3 December 2020 Victor Hugo Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
3 December 2020 Hamlin Garland There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers’ wives.
3 December 2020 Peter Davison Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.
3 December 2020 Edwin Hubbel Chapin Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth – the true poet is very near the oracle.
3 December 2020 Naguib Mahfouz I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
3 December 2020 Patrick White Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
3 December 2020 Giorgos Seferis For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
3 December 2020 Robert Hass I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
3 December 2020 Howard Nemerov I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
