Poetic Canon Quotes

As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back to him again and again. I do go back to Emily Dickinson again and again.

If there's one thing I've written that could survive into posterity, I'd want that to be the poetry.

We sold 400 books of poetry and thought we were well on the way to immortality.

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.

The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.

The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet.

Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.

Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.

Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.