Frank O'Hara Quotes

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.

Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.

That, lad," he said proudly, "was some of the worst poetry I have heard for a long time. It was offensive to the ear and a torrrture to the soul....We'll make a gonnagle out of ye yet!

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

All poetry is misrepresentation.

I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.

Very nice couplet, although there are dull stretches.

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.

Poetry should only occupy the idle.

Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.

Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate.

Poetry is a break for freedom.