John Ashbery Quotes

That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.

I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

So few people read poetry. That's sad, isn't it?

I've written poetry most of my life.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

In a word, poetry can not exist without emotion, or, if you will, without a movement of the soul which regulates the words.

Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.

The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.

The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can't have one without the other.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.