John Crowe Ransom Quotes

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

'The Wizard of Poetry' - I had that title since I did 'The Pretty Toney' album. That's when the name first came to me.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

I like poems that are little games.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

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.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

I am a poet, and I speak poetically.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

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

The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

I've always thought my poems told stories.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.