Whatever my life has been it has been single in purpose, single in design and constantly directed to the one end of discovery, if possible, of some purpose in being alive… Poetry, an art, is what answer I have.
Poetry Quotes
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
I think there is no such thing as a long poem. If it is long it isn’t a poem; it is something else. A book like John Brown’s Body, for instance, is not a poem – it is a series of poems tied together with cord. Poetry is intensity, and nothing is intense for long.
It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
Perhaps there are no warmer lovers of the muse than those who are only permitted occasionally to gain her favors. The shrine is more reverently approached by the pilgrim from afar than the familiar worshiper and is often most beloved by one whose daily vocation is amid the bustle of the world.
My quarrel with poets… is not that they are unclear, but that they are too diligent. Diligence in a poet is the same as dishonesty in a bookkeeper. There are rafts of bards who are writing too much, too diligently, and too slyly.
It is the poet who lives locally, and whose senses are applied no way else than locally to particulars, which are the agent and the maker of all culture. It is the poet’s job and the poet lives on the job, on the location.
Anybody can write the first line of a poem, but is a very difficult task to make the second line rhyme with the first.
The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.
