M. H. Abrams 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.

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

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

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

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.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

I've hated poetry ever since I was at school. I include Shakespeare in that. I don't understand the obsession with him!

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

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.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.