John Hollander Quotes (31 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

John Hollander: 31 quotes0 likes

Famous John Hollander Quotes

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

“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.”

John Hollander

'Poetry' September 1995

“Ultimately poetic thought is interpretive.”

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

Derek Attridge 'Review of 'Vision and Resources' MLR vol.72 no 3 July 1977

John Hollander Quotes about reading

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

'A Conversation with John Hollander' (by email) by Paul Devlin vol 1 St. John's University Humanities Review April 2003

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

John Hollander Quotes

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

John Hollander

'Rhymes's Reason':a guide to English Verse Yale University Press, 1981

“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”

John Hollander

Extract from 'Powers of Thirteen'(1983)
Poetry Quotes

“Great poems are all fables about life.”

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

Review of 'Stanley Cavell and the Claim to Reason' Critical Inquiry, vol 6, no 4 Summer 1980 U of C P

“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.”

John Hollander

“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.”

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

introduction-John Hollander ed.'Committed to Memory' Riverhead Books New York 1996

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

John Hollander

“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.”

John Hollander

Quoted in 'Venerable Poets :Words to Pop Music beat 'by Cynthia Wolfe Boyton.

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

'Vision and Resonance:Two senses of Poetic Form' OUP London 1975

“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”

John Hollander

Extract-last verse from 'An Old Fashioned Song' in 'Tesserae and other poems' (1993)
Poetry Quotes

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

John Hollander

“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.”

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

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

John Hollander

Interview with J D McCarthy 'The Art of Poetry' no 35 Fall 1985

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