Poetic Craftsmanship Quotes

Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.

To be a poet, it's a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you're happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it.

I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.

I discover poetry when I was in elementary school and I was so fascinated by it. Because I realised if you get the right amount of syllables and the right amount of words, in the right rhyme scheme and you put it all together. You make words just bounce of a page.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

He touch'd the tender stops of various quills, With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.

I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.

I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.