Quotes About Literature

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

I do read a poem almost every morning. Unless I'm really, really late, I have to get my poem in.

Your response to literature is to do with maturity; if you don't respond to a book or a poem when you are 12, you might when you are 13.

I have a favorite poem. From Rudyard Kipling. It's called 'L'Envoi.'

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

I like poems and keep sharing them online.

I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.

No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems!

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go to Oberlin and wanted the liberal arts. Obviously I really get intense pleasure out of drawing connections between pieces and poems and literature and ideas.

Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

I've been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the 'Dead Lecturer' poems when I was a kid.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

You litter poems with too much learning when you're younger.

I was an English major, and I always wrote poems.

I was living in Britain and then America, but it wasn't until I returned to live in Ireland in the late '70s that I really became aware of Seamus Heaney. I discovered quickly that his poems are very accessible.

If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.

Short stories and poems are an intense burst of emotions.

I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.