Poetry Quality Quotes

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

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 loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.

Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even - "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

When poems are no good they don't make any sense.

I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.

Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet.

Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men.

Re: Robert Montgomery's Poems His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture. There are colours in the Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. There are words in Mr. Montgomery's writing which, when disposed in certain orders and combinations,have made, and will make again, good poetry. But, as they now stand, they seem to be put together on principle in such a manner as to give no image of anything in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.

If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.

I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.

No bad man can be a good poet.

But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.

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 only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

Feeble verses are those which sin not against rules, but against genius.

Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.

one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid

Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

It is not enough that poetry is agreeable, it should also be interesting.

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