Poetic Achievement Quotes

I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980.

But there's nothing that gives me more thrill than when I'm writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it's just perfect. There's nothing that exciting.

And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable.

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

A good poem about failure is a success.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

If I were to die thinking that I'd written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn't lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us - well, I would settle for a handful.

My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.

In the years 1910 and 1911 I had 51 innings with 10 not outs and an average of 19. This I consider a creditable record for a poet.

I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

Americans have endeavored to soar as high as European bards.

I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things. "The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize." "Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat."

...it will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.

He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master.

There is no doubt that Michael Symmons Roberts is a very good poet - you don't win a Whitbread award and get shortlisted for a TS Eliot prize for nothing. Few poets, though, have ever been good novelists, and vice-versa.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.