“The best poetry of WW2, the most truthful and penetrating, poetry which is rooted in the ground of physical experience, suspicious of the abstract and conforming to the discipline of provenly effective forms.”Vernon Scannell Not Without Glory, 1976
“Some poets are more deeply involved than others in the raw experience which lies behind the poem and for them the act of composition is an act of self exploration with the definite goal of enlightenment rather than the ideally depersonalized construction of a beautiful and autonomous object.”Vernon Scannell Not Without Glory, 1976
“The poet's need to try to find his own voice, a recognizable individual voice that carries the signature of his voice in almost every line... the unique tone being the consequence of the poet's rigorous search for truth ( his truth(, his absolute fidelity to the nature of the experience he was exploring.”Vernon Scannell A Proper Gentleman, 1977
“It is impossible for a poet to fashion the voice deliberately by contrivance and experiment; it could not be discovered or simulated through the cultivation of an eccentric diction or prosody, or by the employment of regional speech rhythms and patterns.”Vernon Scannell A Proper Gentleman, 1977
“A word or a phrase or a line is not a poem. A poem is the exploration and shaping of an experience. A real poem demands intelligence, imagination, passion, understanding, experience and not least a knowledge of the craft.”Vernon Scannell A Proper Gentleman, 1977
“I believe one of the functions of language used poetically is to explore experiences and hidden sources of behavior in a way that will not be tedious to the reader.”Vernon Scannell Tiger and the Rose, 1971
“Well, here I suppose is my life, or part of it, by which I would wish to be judged… poems which have been written from a sense of compulsion, a real need to explore and articulate experiences which have been important to me.”Vernon Scannell Introductory Note
“The word experiment derives from 'experimentum' - that which has been experienced and what, for the writer, has been experienced is the work of his great predecessors”Vernon Scannell A Proper Gentleman, 1977