"Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or……" — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Related Quotes

• For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry — Paul Muldoon
• Many poets, as you know, are not good readers. — Robert Giroux
• Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is… — Harold Bloom
• And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in… — Norman MacCaig
• Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image… — James Broughton
• I think poetry is best read to oneself. — Rickie Lee Jones
• No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work. — Mark Twain
• The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. — Henry David Thoreau
• Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. — Thomas Babington Macaulay
• A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is… — Mark Strand