Robert Fitzgerald Quotes

I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.

The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.

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.

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

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.

There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so.

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

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.

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.

Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.

I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

I have a personal issue with Shakespeare. When I first encountered him, he made me feel thick. Well, not him, but the productions I saw.

I'm an essayist. And this is a genre that has existed for a few thousand years. Ever heard of Cicero? So these rules that I'm working under are not mine but rather were established by writers who recognized the difference between the hard research of journalism and the kind of inquiry of mind that characterizes the essay.

'Homer and Langley' is the work of E. L. Doctorow's old age. There are fewer Homeric references than you might have expected, given that the narrator is called Homer Collyer and is blind, although, like the classical Homer, not born blind.

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

What is a modern poet's fate? / To write his thoughts upon a slate; / The critic spits on what is done, / Gives it a wipe - and all is gone.

There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

making final judgements about poets, cities or regions on the basis of an anthology is always dangerous: anthologies are mirages created, finally, by their editors.