- Language
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- Nov 07, 2020
Poetry Quotes
On verse, beauty, and the search to define art.
This set opens with the case for teaching children poetry early, since it broadens young minds and passes on virtue almost by inheritance, then weighs how differently prose and poetry can each carry weight. See Art quotes for related themes.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Power
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- Nov 07, 2020
Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.
- Men
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.
- Landscape
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
- Eyes
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- Nov 07, 2020
As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: 'Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B.'
- Prayer
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020