Quotes About Poetry

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

One day, I just got up to read a poem and started singing. I looked around - the reaction was great. And I said, 'Oh, boy. I like this.'

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

I think 'accessible' just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader.

A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem.

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.

Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that I didn't love writing and reading. When I was really young, my mother would read poems to me. I loved Edgar Allan Poe - I am sure I didn't understand it, but I loved it.

I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.

Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast - a short reading time, usually poetry. I read in bed every night. I usually get in bed pretty early with a book, and I read until I can't prop my eyes open anymore - sometimes rather late.

'The Duino Elegies' are notoriously cryptic, and part of the reason why I have always loved them is because they invite multiple readings over the course of a lifetime.