3 December 2020 Jack Prelutsky Otherwise I don’t read much adult poetry at all, because I’m not smart enough and mostly I don’t get it.
3 December 2020 Kenneth Koch I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
3 December 2020 Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
3 December 2020 Randall Jarrell 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.
3 December 2020 Robert Adamson Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
3 December 2020 David Hare The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
3 December 2020 A. R. Ammons Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.
3 December 2020 Thomas Lynch So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.
3 December 2020 Andrew Motion I’m not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.
3 December 2020 Jorge Luis Borges Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
3 December 2020 Reynolds Price The older I’ve got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.
3 December 2020 Richard Serra On the other hand, if there’s an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I’ve lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.
3 December 2020 Lafcadio Hearn It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found – indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
3 December 2020 Rita Dove I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
3 December 2020 Richard Eyre Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan 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.
3 December 2020 Percy Bysshe Shelley Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
3 December 2020 Paul Dirac I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
3 December 2020 Michael Sheen My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother’s into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.
3 December 2020 John Keats Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
3 December 2020 Gustave Flaubert All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
3 December 2020 Lord Byron A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
