Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
More modern poetry is written than read.
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.
There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.
While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.
Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.