A. R. Ammons Quotes

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

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

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

It's not easy to define poetry.

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.

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

The cliche is dead poetry.

I often say poetry was my first love.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

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

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

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

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.

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

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

I love poetry - just to read it and be around it.

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

I was an English major in college, so I really liked spoken word and poetry; it was what I did before I wrote music.

I love words; I love poetry.

I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.

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