E. M. Forster Quotes

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.

I'm only interested in poetry.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

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

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

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.

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.

Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.

Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

I've learned a lot as a writer about poetry.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.