Poets on Poetry 8B English

E. E. Cummings “A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t.”

Paul Engle “Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”

Percy Bysse Shelley “All good poems surprise. Great poems keep surprising for longer, for as long as we can imagine. The surprise is not willed: it arrives, lands in our laps. We can sense its approach as we move through the poem, every sense alert.”

Dylan Thomas “The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolised, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time... And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milk carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing. I did not care what the words said… I cared for the shapes of sound that their names, and the words describing their actions, made in my ears.”

Don Paterson “A poem is a machine for remembering itself.” “I would say that the poem exists in a space somewhere between the reader and the author, and in a sense belongs to neither, and both.”

Ezra Pound “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim land of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realising that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions.”

Rosanna Warren “Poetry is a perpetual redefinition of beauty and truth in patterned language. An assault on yesterday’s beauty which no longer shines. An assault on yesterday’s truth which has become a lie.”

William Carlos Williams “…all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents.”