Paul Muldoon Quotes

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes.

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.