Poetic Authenticity Quotes

Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

They’re called poems but in reality they’re lines given to me to hang on to

Political poetry is more profoundly emotional than any other-at least as much as love poetry-and cannot be forced because then it becomes vulgar and unacceptable. It is necessary first to pan though all other poetry in order to become a political poet.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

In the house of poetry nothing endures that is not written with blood to be heard with blood.

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.

The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.

Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal... That was something I earned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing... The cure for that is to write the thing down which you will not publish and which you won't show people. To write secretly... so you can actually be free to say anything you want.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson.

Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.