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.”

“Ultimately poetic thought is interpretive.”

“Not being a philosopher I've had to work through my feelings and puzzlements in poems.”

“The warfare between poetry and philosophy certainly started with Plato, who was both poet and philosopher.”

“English Prosody has tended to be a subject for cranks.”

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

“Central also to reading verse aloud is the handling of enjambment,.. the interplay of line-end and sentence-flow.”

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

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

“Winter wields only the spades, Summer brandishes
Hot, black clubs, Spring shower hearts about and Autumn shows
A fall of diamonds in our climate of extremes”

“Great poems are all fables about life.”

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

“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.”

“The study of rhetoric distiguishes between tropes, or figuresvof 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.”

“Contrastive stress is very important in English, as poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts of this kind.”

“Reciting a poem aloud, you are not like an actor, rather you come to understand, then to be, the voice of the poem itself.”

“Poetry may be written on paper, but it’s an oral art. A good poem satisfies the ear. It creates a story or picture that grabs you.”

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

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

“Metre is to rhythm as eye is to ear.”

“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 is an abstraction from. or residue of musical form. The ghost of oral poetry never vanishes therefrom. All poetry was originally oral.”

“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.”

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

“I find free verse very, very difficult to write.”

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

“The blueprints of verse can be used to build things made of literal, or nonpoetic material, which is why most verse is not poetry.”

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