Miller Williams Quotes

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

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

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

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

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

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.