Donald Hall Quotes

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

There's something so wonderful about writing in rhyme where it isn't just the meaning of the words, it's the music to the words and the shape and the sound.

Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.

Poetry is meant to be heard.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

A really good poem is full of music.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music. William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician. All of his poems are all like songs, and that's how I always try to start my thoughts.