Paul Engle Quotes

Quotes about:

• Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

  Paul Engle

  Ideas, Reading Poetry, Skins

  New York Times, February 17, 1957.

  48 Copy quote

• Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.

  Paul Engle

  Vision, Bills, Paid

  4 Copy quote

• Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

  Paul Engle

  Writing, Rewriting

  4 Copy quote

• I can still remember the feel in my hand of that most wonderful American coin ever minted, a nickel with a buffalo on one side and the head of an Indian on the other. That nickel was a daily proof of our country's past. Bring it back!

  Paul Engle

  Country, Past, Hands

  5 Copy quote

• The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

  Paul Engle

  Christmas, Mother, Memories

  Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.182, University of Iowa Press

  7 Copy quote

• I knew about holiness, never having missed a Sunday-school class since I started at four years. But if Jews were also religious, how could our neighbor with the grease-grimy shirt use the word 'damn' about them?

  Paul Engle

  Religious, School, Sunday

  Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.151, University of Iowa Press

  4 Copy quote

• Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.

  Paul Engle

  Horse, House, Automobile

  6 Copy quote

• A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.

  Paul Engle

  Horse, Children, Air

  Paul Engle (1960). “Prairie Christmas”

  13 Copy quote

• The corncob was the central object of my life. My father was a horse handler, first trotting and pacing horses, then coach horses, then work horses, finally saddle horses. I grew up around, on, and under horses, fed them, shoveled their manure, emptied the mangers of corncobs.

  Paul Engle

  Horse, Father, Firsts

  4 Copy quote

• You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.

  Paul Engle

  Vanity, Drug, Taste

  4 Copy quote

• But maybe it's up the hills or under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.

  Paul Engle

  Writing, College, Missing

  4 Copy quote

• I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.

  Paul Engle

  Boys, Knives, Terrible

  Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.153, University of Iowa Press

  4 Copy quote

• All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.

  Paul Engle

  Nuts, Cake, Black

  Paul Engle (1960). “Prairie Christmas”

  12 Copy quote

• Corncobs are the greatest fire-making tinder.

  Paul Engle

  Fire, Tinder

  Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.152, University of Iowa Press

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

  Paul Engle

  Reading Poetry, Language And Power, Ordinary

  New York Times, February 17, 1957.

  7 Copy quote

• Our small ears never had such a workout as on the Fourth of July, hearing not only our own bursting crackers but also those of our friends, and often the boom of homemade cannon shot off by daring boys of 16 years, ready to lose a hand if it blew up.

  Paul Engle

  Workout, Boys, July

  4 Copy quote

• For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

  Paul Engle

  Summer, Philosophy, Vacation

  Paul Engle (1996). “A lucky American childhood”, Univ of Iowa Pr

  5 Copy quote

• I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.

  Paul Engle

  Horse, Survival, Age

  6 Copy quote

• All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

  Paul Engle

  Love, Cities, Voice

  4 Copy quote

• Soldiers of the American Revolution fought that 18th century war with heavy muskets. In the early 20th century, we kids fought it every Fourth of July not only with exploding powder and shimmering flares, but with all of our senses.

  Paul Engle

  War, Kids, July

  8 Copy quote

• I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places.

  Paul Engle

  Illinois, Yale, Library

  4 Copy quote

• I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.'

  Paul Engle

  Home, Holiday, Horizon

  4 Copy quote

• When your first marriage goes into tragedy, you become very battle-scarred... I even thought of suicide. Luckily, I had known some happy marriages.

  Paul Engle

  Suicide, Tragedy, Battle

  4 Copy quote

• Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

  Paul Engle

  Grief, Delight, Pages

  Paul Engle (1965). “A Woman Unashamed: And Other Poems”, New York, Random House

  7 Copy quote

• Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.

  Paul Engle

  Art, School, Gone

  4 Copy quote

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