Italo Calvino Quotes

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

It's not easy to define poetry.

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

I like to write poetry.

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

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

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.

I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.

I read mostly poetry.

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.

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

To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.

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

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.

Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.