Paul Muldoon Quotes

Rarely do you meet an American who knows his Wordsworth.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.

I like Shakespeare. I like some of his work a lot.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

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.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

I'd love to get my teeth into Shakespeare.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

So few people read poetry. That's sad, isn't it?

When I first became brave enough to tell people that I wrote poems, so many people would rave to me about Edna St. Vincent Millay's work. I was embarrassed not to have read her, and I think that put me off from reading her for a long time. So many of her poems are just impeccable.

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

I know who the great poets are.

I love English and literature.

When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot.