Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

RIMER, n. A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem.

I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.

If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.

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

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

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

The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

Nearly all men and women are poetical, to some extent, but very few can be called poets. There are great poets, small poets, and men and women who make verses. But all are not poets, nor even good versifiers. Poetasters are plentiful, but real poets are rare. Education can not make a poet, though it may polish and develop one.

I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.

The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.

So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade.

I discover poetry when I was in elementary school and I was so fascinated by it. Because I realised if you get the right amount of syllables and the right amount of words, in the right rhyme scheme and you put it all together. You make words just bounce of a page.

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.

Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet.

You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.

The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope. The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.

When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.