Mason Cooley Quotes

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

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 critic should describe, and not prescribe.

There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

I don't read the critics.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

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.

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

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

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 always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

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.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

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.

Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.

I get a great laugh from artists who ridicule the critics as parasites and artists manqués — sucha horrible joke. I can’t imagine a more perfect art form, a moreperfect career than criticism. I can’t imagine anything more valuableto do.

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.

The question "From where does the poet get it?" addresses only the what, nobody learns anything about the how when asking that question.

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.