Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.
In our hands, even the straightest lyric sounded shady.
Nothing which is harmonized by the bond of the Muse can be changed from its own to another language without destroying its sweetness
The true poem rests between the words.
When I did rap and rhyme, it wasn't just a word that rhymed with another one.
Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.
You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.
It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.
I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
The Elizabethan mind wanted and demanded that one word could mean 50 things. What Shakespeare offers us is not ambiguity; it's choices.
It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.
By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.
Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.
Unfortunately, many just read 'Gitanjali' and think they know Tagore. Nothing could be further from the truth. He is much, much more.
Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.
A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.
In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
Happy who in his verse can gently steer, From grave to light, from pleasant to severe.
