Virginia Woolf Quotes

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.

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

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

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

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

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

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

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

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

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 would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.

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

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.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

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 shall, in due time, be a Poet.

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.