Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless. — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other. — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
“When a long-desired baby is born, what joy! More happiness than we find in sex, more than we take in success, revenge, or wealth.… — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
“The tree is burning on the autumn noon That builds each year the leaf and bark again. Though frost will strip it raw and… — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside. — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
“When I was sixteen I read ten books a week: E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed… — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers. — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
Sweet death, small son, our instrument Of immortality, Your cries and hungers document Our bodily decay. — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,… — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity. — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
“As Henry Moore carved or modelled his sculpture every day, he strove to surpass Donatello 4. and failed, but woke the next morning elated… — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop,… — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes… — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
“I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in."… — Donald Hall Copy Share Image
