Robert Giroux Quotes

Nearly all men and women are poetical, to some extent, but very few can be called poets. There are great poets, small poets, and men and women who make verses. But all are not poets, nor even good versifiers. Poetasters are plentiful, but real poets are rare. Education can not make a poet, though it may polish and develop one.

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.

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

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

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.

To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it's a question of paying attention.

If I were to have a dream job, it would probably be a poet. Then again, I don't think I'm a very good poet!

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

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

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

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.

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.