John Barton Quotes

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 you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

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

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Every time you revisit a book, you get something else out of it.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

I have been in love with Emily Dickinson's poetry since I was 13, and, like an anonymous post on findagrave.com says, 'Dear Emily - I hope I have understood.' Emily's poems are sometimes difficult, often abstract, on occasion flippant, but her mind is inside them.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

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.

I read mostly poetry.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

It's not easy to define poetry.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.