Louis MacNeice Quotes

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.