A. R. Ammons Quotes

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

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.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and can be published, in most cases, quite cheaply.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!