Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant... Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre.

A poem is a flexible thing, and a poem is a poem.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

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

I really came to literature through poetry.

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet.

I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

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 like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.

Well-written words are music.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I read mostly poetry.