Mary Oliver Quotes

I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that I didn't love writing and reading. When I was really young, my mother would read poems to me. I loved Edgar Allan Poe - I am sure I didn't understand it, but I loved it.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.