Simon Schama Quotes

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 don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

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 read mostly poetry.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

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.

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

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

I wrote some serious stuff in high school; however, I hadn't been exposed to any of the major poets, not even the minor ones... I read nothing but Sara Teasdale.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

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

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.

No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems!

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.