Wallace Stevens Quotes

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.

I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

It's not easy to define poetry.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.