John Barton Quotes

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

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.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

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

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.