Quotes About Literature

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

Don't you think that as a people, Americans have less poetry, real poetry, in their souls than any other nations?

Although it is true that petros and petra can mean 'stone' and 'rock' respectively in earlier Greek, the distinction is largely confined to poetry.

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.

I love indices! They are poetry in and of themselves, depending on the book.

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

I think poetry is best read to oneself.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I really came to literature through poetry.

Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.

My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.

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

So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade.

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

Most Americans do not like poetry. We may respect it, but we do not enjoy it.

I read a lot of prose poetry and get inspired by more-so just a state of mind.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.