Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.

I like poems that are complex.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

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

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.

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

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.

I read mostly poetry.

Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.

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

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.

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.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.

I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.

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.

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

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

I wrote some serious stuff in high school; however, I hadn't been exposed to any of the major poets, not even the minor ones... I read nothing but Sara Teasdale.