Kenneth Koch Quotes

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

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.

Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.

A hundred cabinet-makers in London can work a table or a chair equally well; but no one poet can write verses with such spirit and elegance as Mr. Pope.

My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

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

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

I have just discovered the beautiful poetry of Soren Ulrik Thomsen. Danish is not the strongest of languages, but he uses it very well.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare.

A thousand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope.

Poesy must not be drawn by the ears: it must be gently led, or rather, it must lead, which was partly the cause that made the ancient learned affirm it was a divine, and no human skill, since all other knowledges lie ready for any that have strength of wit; a poet no industry can make, if his own genius be not carried into it.

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

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.