“All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist
“In Australia during WWII, a couple of established poets invented the supposedly nonsensical works of a fictitious poet called Ern Malley and used them to discredit the modernist pretensions of the young editor who printed them. It never occurred to them that as writers of talent they were not in a position to suppose that they could deliberately write something perfectly meaningless.”
'Congratulations!', on scams, frauds and hoaxes.
Television and radio, Radio 4: A Point of View
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Clive James151
Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator an… 1939–2019Related quotes
Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet
A Proper Gentleman, 1977
“…the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist
of The Listening Landscape by Marya Zaturenska; “Town Mouse, Country Mouse”, p. 69
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer
Laura Riding and Robert Graves, from A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (Doubleday, 1928)
Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter
from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959
“It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.”
Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer
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.
“Lunatics are writers whose works write them.”
David Mitchell book Ghostwritten
"Night Train"
Ghostwritten (1999)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher
that does not occur to them.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 36e