Quotes About Literature

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

I'm reading a manuscript by Rodney Jones, "Village Prodigies",it's one of the best contemporary poetry books I've ever read ever.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

A comic matter cannot be expressed in tragic verse. [Lat., Versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult.]

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

I have to submit to much in order to pacify the touchy tribe of poets.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

In English, we were still on the Introduction to Poetry Unit, and I'm not lying, if I ever meet Percy Bysshe Shelley walking down the streets of Marysville, I'm going to punch him right in the face.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

There were poets before Homer.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems

Thats a wonderful change thats taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

Romance is the poetry of literature.

We have the ability to be the Athens of modern times as opposed to the militaristic Sparta. I remind you that the Athenians wrote poetry. The Spartans did not.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.