Simon Schama Quotes

There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.

If, at a party, I say I'm a poet, people have a hard time responding, almost as if I'd said I'm a priest.

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

I'm ashamed to admit that I very seldom read poetry, even though many of my friends are poets.

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.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.

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

The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

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

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.

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

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.