A. E. Housman Quotes

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

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

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

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.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

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

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.

All poetry is difficult to read - The sense of it anyhow.

All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.

In law school they teach you that everything is a contract; well, in poetry everything is a narrative.

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

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.

For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.