John Hollander Quotes

Very few writers of verse can read their work to keep their listeners aware of the beauty of sense, that sense of beauty from the powerful , delicate ways in which sense is made by poetry.

For the poet, the biblical sense of 'know' is as much part of nature as the heat of fire, and in the cognative sense as much a given phenomonen as the brightness itself.

'Poetic form' is a very deep matter that covers much more than phonological or typological pattern.

The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design.

Great poems are all fables about life.

English Prosody has tended to be a subject for cranks.

Ultimately poetic thought is interpretive.

One crosses the brink of literalness into poetry by desiring , noticing, fixing on something and wondering what to make of it.

Inspiration comes within a framework. A poem that gets out of hand is not a poem.

Metre is to rhythm as eye is to ear.

I find free verse very, very difficult to write.

Poetic form, as we know it, is an abstraction from, or residue of musical form.... The ghost of oral poetry never vanishes...all poetry was originally oral.

The more you understand a poem and its complexities and depth, the more you will be able to do when reading it aloud.

Rhythm and repetition of sounds, words and phrases make spoken poetry sound different to ordinary discourse.

I revise very little. I always write in long hand and revise when I type. I test them out when I read them aloud.