Spanish Poetry Quotes

To be blunt, I feel like lyricism in Spanish is of a different quality than English. You can get really poetic in Spanish, but I feel like if you do that in English, you risk sounding cheesy. In Spanish, it's never that. It's always this deep, passionate, beautiful imagery; it's painted different, a different color.

My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico García Lorca.

I think in general I've never dared compose in Spanish. First of all, it is such an intricate language.

[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, ... as have also long since our best English tragedies, as... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.

I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us.

I like a lot of Spanish language writers. I really love Javier Marias.

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

I could speak Spanish fluently growing up, but I'm so out of practice, and I have such a tremendous respect for songwriting in the Spanish language.

I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.

Living here in Cambridge, you had to have an identity. It was not enough to be a wife. So I did a Ph.D. in medieval Spanish poetry.

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.