
“All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”
'Congratulations!', on scams, frauds and hoaxes.
Television and radio, Radio 4: A Point of View
“All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”
“…the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.”
of The Listening Landscape by Marya Zaturenska; “Town Mouse, Country Mouse”, p. 69
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Laura Riding and Robert Graves, from A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (Doubleday, 1928)
from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959
“It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.”
The Poet and the World (1996)
Context: Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events"… But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.
It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.
that does not occur to them.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 36e