I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
The more congenial page of some tenth-rate poeticule worn out with failure after failure and now squat in his hole like the tailless fox, he is curled up to snarl and whimper beneath the inaccessible vine of song.
The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.
The role of the poet is almost nothing...drearily nothing. And when he steps outside of his boots and tries to get tough as our dear Ezra [Pound] did, he will get his pink little ass slapped.
The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.
A thing may fail as a poem because it tries to do what a poem cannot do: it tries to become a treatise on cosmic truth... We can best be exact about the cosmic things - God and truth, beauty, eternity and love - by not talking directly about them.
That, lad," he said proudly, "was some of the worst poetry I have heard for a long time. It was offensive to the ear and a torrrture to the soul....We'll make a gonnagle out of ye yet!
Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.
Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it
I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts know it That you weren't much of a muse, but then I weren't much of a poet
My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.
There was a poor poet named Clough, Whom his friends all united to puff, But the public, though dull, Had not such a skull As belonged to believers in Clough.
The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.
For poetry, he's past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme; His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I'd have him throw away his pen, But there's no talking to some men.
He who studies to imitate the poet Pindar, O Julius, relies on artificial wings fastened on with wax, and is sure to give his name to a glassy sea.
