Knut Hamsun Quotes

Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.

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.

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song.

The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

Rarely do you meet an American who knows his Wordsworth.

I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.

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

English is like music. The English language is really fit for singing. The notes match the feelings, and it makes sense.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

You have to write some poetry, first of all, to decide if you can become a lyricist. I was born in a family of poets.

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.

In 20th-century poetry, Robert Graves is to love what Philip Larkin is to mortality.