John Ciardi Quotes

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies rather than in what he portrays, and more than any other poet must he wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of himself.

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

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

The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.

The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go.

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

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

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

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

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.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

That's all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction - I don't think anyone could know how much it really means.

What is the point of narrating poetry when the listener can't appreciate and enjoy the meaning?

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.

What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.

Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex.

My first wish is to be simple in my actions, truthful in my speech, honest in my opinions, and natural in my behavior. In other words, I want to be clean in mind, heart, and body.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way