Louis MacNeice Quotes

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

Granted, I'm someone who loves words. I've always loved poetry - so it's suited to me.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

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

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

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

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

I like to write poetry.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

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

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.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

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.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.

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.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

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.