John Crowe Ransom Quotes

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

I hate artists who are not of their time.

Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.

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

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

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

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

Postmodernism came nowhere close in quality to Modernism at its apogee, not least because that later style wholly lacked the social impetus that animated the designs most emblematic of the Modern Movement.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

The American public does not know poets exist.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.