Quotes About Literature

Patriarchal Poetry makes mistakes.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails - and Imagination the rudder.

Has it ever occurred to you, ' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

Next o'er his books his eyes began to roll, In pleasing memory of all he stole.

If I wouldn't of spent so much time shooting spit wads at my English teacher I'd know how to punctuate good thing I normally write poetry.

A badly written novel can always be shortened to a poem.

All that is not prose passes for poetry.

The reader who is illuminated is in a real sense the poem.

For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

So few people read poetry. That's sad, isn't it?

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.

He that shall peruse the political pamphlets of any past reign will wonder why they were so eagerly read, or so loudly praised.

Sales of George Orwell's 1984 have skyrocketed. It's true. So the fallout from the (NSA spying) scandal is worse than we thought. It's forcing Americans to read.

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.

Walt Kelly was much more interested in allegory and politics, and I'm much more interested in metaphors and myth.

"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Things to know from books to read