Anthony Hecht Quotes

The thing about metaphors is that, if you give them away, you give away the mystery.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

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

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

I like to play with tropes.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' had a formative effect on me. I think it's one of those works that if you encounter it very early you're doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.