John Drinkwater Quotes

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

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

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.

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

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

I like poems that are complex.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, I never indulge in poetics - Unless I am down with rheumatics.

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.

The cliche is dead poetry.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

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.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.

I often say poetry was my first love.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

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