John Hollander Quotes

We and the trees and the way
Back from the fields of play
Lasted as long as we could No more walks in the wood

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.

I usually seem to finish a poem when I write it down. I may have been carrying the notion around in my head.

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

The building blocks of poetry itself are elements if fiction -fable, 'image', metaphor-all the material if the nonliteral.

You can teach the writing of verse..like prose..an instrument..and the recognition of true poetry. The rest, writers must teach themselves.

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

Metre is to rhythm as eye is to ear.

The large (in English) unphilosophical, 'poetic' or 'religious' questions are elicited from their precise and technical microcosms.

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.

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

Reading a poem aloud by someone who understands it, can be a crucial experience, but better yet is reading it aloud oneself.

Major poetry not only 'employs' metaphor, irony and other tropes (and is of them) but always and explicitly or implicitly considers the nature of the trope itself.

A teacher (of poetry) has to know and feel what poetry is , and be able - and this is crucial- to read it aloud effectively.

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.