Stephen Spender Quotes

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

It's not easy to define poetry.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

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

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

My strong suits, coming from poetry, will naturally be description, which I love doing. It comes very easily, and possibly structure, up to a point.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

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

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

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