Mary Oliver Quotes

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the effects which he produced.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

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.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

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

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.