Robert Adamson Quotes

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about - don't waste your time looking for your own style.' I wish I could remember who told me that, because I'd like to congraulate him. I've emulated all the old guys - Tennyson, Alexander Pope.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.