Attention Quote by Robert Lowell

The formal stuff feels old and windy. Not to say you shouldn't know prosody. But it's a wonderful time for exploratory poetics. Contemporary poets…

— Anne Waldman

More modern poetry is written than read.

— P. J. O'Rourke

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language…

— Mark Strand

In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read…

— Caroline Kennedy

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At…

— Czeslaw Milosz

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something…

— W. S. Merwin

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is…

— Thomas Lynch

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer…

— Ezra Pound

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either…

— Andrew Motion

Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.

— Joseph Brodsky

“Many of the poets writing today are hung up on language and symbolism. If the poem does not have depth of meaning or fit…

— Harley King

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky…

— Janet Fitch