Helen Vendler Quotes

I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.

Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

I feel in poetry there aren't that many rules that you need to absolutely live by depending on your style of poetry.

Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

...the best figurative poetry speaks not to the frivolous intellect, but (if anything does) straight to the heart; and does it better than plain prose. There seems then to be something which is better said with metaphor than without, which goes straighter to its mark by going crooked, and hits its aim exactly by flying off at tangents.

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.

Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

Art needs an operation

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.