Helen Vendler Quotes

16 quotes in 246 categories

• One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.
• Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.
• A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.
• You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.
• The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace.
• All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.
• For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing.…
• Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.
• For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes…
• Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
• I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems…
• The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.
• There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.
• I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father…
• If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.
• I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that…

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