Ian Mcewan Quotes

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.

Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

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.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

I recommend the art of slow reading.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

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.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

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

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

What is the point of narrating poetry when the listener can't appreciate and enjoy the meaning?

People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which oenophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling.

People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.

making final judgements about poets, cities or regions on the basis of an anthology is always dangerous: anthologies are mirages created, finally, by their editors.

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

Meditation takes discipline, just like learning how to play piano. If you want to learn how to play the piano, it takes more than a few minutes a day, once a while, here and there. If you really want to learn any important skill, whether it is playing piano or meditation, it grows with perseverance, patience, and systematic training.

And the quality of good judgement is clearly a form of knowledge and skill, as it is because of knowledge and not because of ignorance that we judge well.

I bless the gods for not letting my education in rhetoric, poetry, and other literary studies come easily to me, and thereby sparing me from an absorbing interest in these subjects.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love