Gilbert Highet Quotes

Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.

For something to be useful to the spirit is not very valuable to get your covered wagon across the desert. We have adopted that attitude so thoroughly that any American father whose son tells him he wants to write poetry will be embarrassed.

My work should be seen as poetry.

So few people read poetry. That's sad, isn't it?

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

More modern poetry is written than read.

I always thought of words as art supplies.

The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.

In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.

Poetry is this gorgeous, complex history rendered in verse and song, a blueprint that can lead you back into the world after you've walked into air.

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.

I don't enjoy art.

I'm ashamed to admit that I very seldom read poetry, even though many of my friends are poets.

I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.

What mattered to Abu was the music of the sentence. 'A shadow does not belong to the object that casts it.' To Abu, it was a little poem. And in general, it was the poetics, the music of things that tossed his confetti.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

Writing does not resurrect. It buries.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.