Poetic Merit Quotes

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.

Very nice couplet, although there are dull stretches.

Subtract from many modern poets all that may be found in Shakespeare, and trash will remain.

I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.

I'd always tended to regard song lyrics as sort of a bastard medium because they're subjugated under the music. If you were to regard them as poetry, it would be bad, embarrassing, confessional poetry - a lot of the lyrics I love.

The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.

Made poetry a mere mechanic art.

I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

I hate Yeats! A lot of his poems are not very good, but some are obviously okay. But how has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man? He was a huge fan of Mussolini. He was really into fascism. He believed deeply in the idea of a 'noble class' who are superior by birth to the plebs.