Books Quote by James Wright

The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.

— Louis Dudek

I think a book-length poem stands about as good a chance as a collection of individual poems in reaching its field of ears. This…

— C.D. Wright

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

— John Drinkwater

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A badly written novel can always be shortened to a poem.”

— Gloria D. Gonsalves

The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.

— Nikki Giovanni

I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.

— Edgar Allan Poe

It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then…

— Edgar Allan Poe

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

— James Schuyler

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not…

— Seamus Heaney

I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.

— Alison Hawthorne Deming