John Milton Quotes

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

Poetry is a mug's game.

Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet.

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

When you're doing poetry like mine that rhymes, it's very easy to sound like a song that didn't work out!

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

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

I've written poetry most of my life.

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day.

In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.

My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.