George Steiner Quotes

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

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.

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.

I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

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

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I read mostly poetry.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

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

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.

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

I do think that all of us think in poems.

I like to write poetry.

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

I have written a lot about the fine arts, but I'd never written about the literary arts, and so on some level Dante really, you know, spoke to me, as new ground but also familiar ground.

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.