Modern Poetry Quotes

• The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

  Robert Morgan

  Modern, Poetry Is, Watersheds

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• The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

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• over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about?

  May Sarton

  Needs, Way, Language

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• Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another...

  W. H. Auden

  People, History, Firsts

  "The Dyer's Hand". "The Listener" Magazine, June 30, 1955.

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• Modern" poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are who could endure a century of transition ?

  Randall Jarrell

  Past, Wish, Transition

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "A Note on Poetry" (p. 48), 1980.

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• While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

  David Antin

  Song, Thinking, Speech

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• The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Long, Wonder, Communism

  P. J. O'Rourke (2007). “The CEO of the Sofa”, p.83, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.

  Wendy Cope

  Wife, Poetry, Reason

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• But Carroll's were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way: 1) Babies are illogical. 2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile. 3) Illogical persons are despised. Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles. And: 1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste. 2) No modern poetry is free from affectation. 3) All of your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles. 4) No affected poetry is popular among people of taste. 5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles. Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting.

  Steve Martin

  Baby, Real, People

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• Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

  W. S. Merwin

  Modern, Lorca

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• As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.

  Ted Hughes

  Book, Journey, Watches

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• You know I have about the same interest in jewelry as I have in politics, horse racing, modern poetry, and women who need weird excitement – none.

  Cary Grant

  Horse, Racing, Needs

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• Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most... are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.

  James Fenton

  Regret, Believe, Reading

  "An Introduction to English Poetry". Book by James Fenton, 2002.

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• A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

  Walter Pater

  Important, Elements, Consciousness

  Walter Pater (2011). “Essays from The Guardian”, p.95, Cambridge University Press

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• Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

  Cyril Connolly

  Arguing, Poet, Modern

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• What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Writing, Long, Waiting

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