Pastoral Resources

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.