H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

The American public does not know poets exist.

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.