Lascelles Abercrombie Quotes

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice.

I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it.

I was always into poetry and writing. So the urgency of spoken word is something that really has always appealed to me.

I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everybody speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

I like to write poetry.

The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical. That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.

When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

I write poetry on my iPhone. I've got about 100 poems on there.

In third or fourth grade, I loved to sign stories and monologues.

Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.

My love of written language is every bit as great as my love for music.

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

I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.

I've written poetry most of my life.

I take my spoken-word stuff extremely seriously because I feel like that's true writing, true lyricism.