Books Quote by Marshall McLuhan

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.

— Matthea Harvey

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

— William Carlos Williams

The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as…

— Robert Scholes

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

— Nikki Giovanni

“Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a peculiarly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone,…

— Terry Eagleton

The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

— Mary Oliver

The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent,…

— Salvatore Quasimodo

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.

— Yusef Komunyakaa

When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.”

— Helen Vendler

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Writing poetry is about learning to pare down the poem to the most essential words. Every word used has to be crucial to the…

— Harley King