Poetry Evaluation Quotes

There's no musical landscape to poetry. It has somewhat of a higher standard than songs, I think.

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd

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

Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry.

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation. Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.

I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

Who all in raptures their own works rehearse, And drawl out measur'd prose, which they call verse.