Ian Hamilton Finlay Quotes

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

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

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

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

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.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

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

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

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

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.

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.

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

I like poems that are little games.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

I love playing with words and texture.

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, I never indulge in poetics - Unless I am down with rheumatics.