Literary Renewal Quotes

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost - that it is born again.