Mark Strand Quotes

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

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

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

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.

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.

If we took Chaucer's writings at face value, we'd have to conclude he was a complete drip.

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.