Allen Tate Quotes

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

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

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.

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

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.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

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

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

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.

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

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

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.

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

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

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

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

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

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.

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

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