From On Poetry & Craft

Checked quotes have been posted on LJ/DW.

"How to Write Like Somebody Else"

• "I suggest that the central critical problem remains: whether a real poem has been created. If it has, the matter of influence becomes irrelevant."
• "One of the great and early temptations is Beautiful Words."

"The Poet's Business"

• "Poet: a constant selectivity; a refusal to elucidate with a mass of detail."
• "Basis of poetry is sensation: many poets today deny sensation, or some have no sensation: the cult of the torpid."
• "A small thing well done is better than the pretentious failure. If a thing fails rhythmically it's nothing."
• "Inspiration: the important thing in life is to have the right kind of frustration."
• "Much to be learnt from bad poems."
• "Exactness is unfashionable; connotative sloppiness is in."
• "A poet is judged, in part, by the influences he resists."
• "A 'movement' is a dead fashion."
• "To learn to suck out the best in a fashion."
• "Continual writing is really a bad form of dissipation; it drains away the marrow of the brain."
• "What do we need to know? The history of ideas can get more evidence from the reading of poetry than vice versa. Same with source-chasing."
• "The artist has several levels of life always available. If he falls to the ground with a theme or gets a 'block,' he can always return to life--to the routine task."
• "Freedom has its tyrannies--even in verse."
• "The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone."
• "Move over, sensitive sad minds."
• "Live in a perpetual great astonishment."

"Words for Young Writers"

• "Great teachers are not necessarily systematic thinkers. The very act of teaching is against this."
• "Say to yourself: I will learn and treasure every good turn of speech ever made."
• "In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write."
• "The intuitive poet often begins most felicitously, but raptures are hard to sustain."
• "Transcend that vision. What is first or early is easy to believe. But...it may enchain you."
• "Reject nothing, but re-order all."
• "There's nothing like ignorance to engender wild enthusiasm."
• "One of those bright young men who spend all their time being right; a brisk metallic negative intelligence."
• "The tragedy inherent in enhancing tradition: to embrace the dead in the right way; or how to kiss a ghost."
• "May my silences become more accurate."

"The Teaching Poet"

• "It's a departure, verse writing is, from the ordinary run of things in a college--for almost all thinking has been directed toward analysis, a breaking-down, whereas the metaphor is a synthesis, a building-up, a creation of a new world, however incomplete, crude, tawdry, naive it may be. It will have, for better or worse, its own shape and form and identity--and how often can that be said of thinking today?"
• "'Form' is thought of as a sieve, to use Auden's metaphor, for catching certain kinds of material."
• "I remember Robert Frost saying in conversation, 'Let's be accurate, but not too accurate'--the viewpoint of the writer, not the scholar, I daresay. But certainly the notion that teacher is omniscient, or ought to be, should be dispelled immediately and promptly."

"The Cat in the Classroom"

• "All the time you're in here something is supposed to be going on: you're not just sitting there, you're not receptacles, little vessels into which I pour something: our insights are mutual."
• "Teacher: one who carries on his education in public."
• "Those black hours when he feels that he has dispersed himself on the air."

"I Teach Out of Love"

• "Poetry is an act of mischief."
• "A poet's rhythmical energy is, I should say, the index to his psychic energy."
• "A poetry of longing: not for escape, but for a greater reality."
• "I work very slowly: I can afford to be terribly spontaneous."
• "I need the botanist's leaf more than the poet's flower."
• "Is associational thinking just a trick? If so, it's a good one, and for some of the slow boys, of whom I am one, it takes very long to learn."
• "Eternal apprenticeship is the life of the true poet."
• ✔ "We are condemned to singing when we can; / Each long root blossoms to a different sun."

"The Teaching of Poetry"

• "Once a week, take a day off to be generous-minded."

"First Class"

• "Immobility is fatal in the arts."
• "A culture in which it is easier to publish a book about poetry than a book of poems."
• "What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?"

"A Psychic Janitor"

• "In poetry, there are no casual readers."

"The Beautiful Disorder"

• "I have only a few ideas; and some of them are almost dead from overwork..."
• "Not inspiration but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers."
• "I recommend that you go, on your own, and immediately, to poets closer to your own age. Some may reflect your own confusions--let them be nameless--read them passionately and critically."
• "Create: then disown."
• ✔ "I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words."