John Drinkwater Quotes

I love words. They're fun. I don't think any word can just be filler. There's no room for it. It's like a puzzle. Every song can be written a million times. How can you say it differently?

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

I'd kill to be a poet.

I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical. That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.