Jamie Wyeth Quotes

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

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

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

The difference between a top-flight creative man and the hack is his ability to express powerful meanings indirectly.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

I love when I dive into lyrics that give me human complexity and intricate narrative.

There's a lot of heart to Bob's work that doesn't always get recognized because of all of the sensuality, dark statements and wit of his work.

The most subtle art, the strongest and deepest art - supreme art - is the one that does not at first allow itself to be recognized.

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.

It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.