“Few pay attention to the histories and the root pictures words can release. These neglected qualities are there, however, and the poets… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
“Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
“Poetry is man’s best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions.” — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
“What greater violence can be done to the poet’s experience than to drag it into an early morning classroom and to go… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
“The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
But when the pen is in his hand he has to write by itch and twitch, though certainly his itch and twitch are intimately… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
Who could believe an ant in theory? A giraffe in blueprint? Ten thousand doctors of what's possible Could reason half the jungle out of… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
“There was a young lady from Gloucester Who complained that her parents both bossed her, So she ran off to Maine. Did her parents… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watch With Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby stars Mounted on spheres and the Primum Mobile… — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone. — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it. — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
Boys are the cash of war. Whoever said: we're not free spenders- doesn't know our like. — John Ciardi Copy Share Image
