Poetic Intent Quotes

Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.

The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.

When you write poetry you are always addressing the world somehow.

If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory of poetry. I think that's pretty smart. I think that it doesn't need to be altogether true, but that was my starting place.

The problem with music was always that the sound system often obliterated the words, and words, not music, have always been what I was about.

Poetry is a verdict rather than an intention.

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.

It is not my purpose as a poet to condemn war (or to be exact, modern warfare). I only wish to present the universal aspects of a particular event.

Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.

For me, the poetic decisions tend to be calculated, and the musical decisions inspired by the poetic decisions are free.

I felt it's vague enough for the reader to pull their own story and their wisdom out of the poem, but for me, it's actually very painfully transparent what I've written. Sometimes very literal, which is scary.

Though my verse but roam the air And murmur in the trees, You may discern a purpose there, As in music of the bees.