More modern poetry is written than read.
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. ...
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
What Shelley's world of Prometheus Unbound really has to fear is not resurrection of Jupiter but the resurrection of John Donne.
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech...
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning...
Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
The cure for our modern maladies is dirt under the fingernails and the feel of thick grass between the toes. The cure for our listlessness is to be out within the invigorating wind. The cure for our uselessness is to take back up our stewardship; for...
