Northrop Frye Quotes

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

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.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

When an analogy is really singing, it's what you want it to be.

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

I like poems that are complex.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

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 wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

I think poetry, rather than suffering, is more and more sufficient to the needs of our society. It's one of the reasons so much of it is, for want of a better term, 'surreal.'

Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.