J. Courtney Sullivan Quotes

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.

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

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, I never indulge in poetics - Unless I am down with rheumatics.

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

I like poems that are complex.

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

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.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.