David Ferry Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

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

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

I read mostly poetry.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

It's not easy to define poetry.

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

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.

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.