Able Quote by James Fenton

Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

— May Sarton

It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do,…

— Ellen Glasgow

I never had much education in English poetry as such,

— Anne Carson

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

— May Sarton

We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.

— T. S. Eliot

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

— Norman MacCaig

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

— David Hockney

Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

— Brooks Atkinson

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very…

— Robert Morgan

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

— Peter Davison

All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be…

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There’s no preparation for poetry.

— Charles Simic