American poetry Quotes

“American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.”

“American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.”

“American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.”

“I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.”

“Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.”

“I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.”

“Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac”

“I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.”

“For the past thirty years or so, much American poetry has been marked by an earnestness that rejects the comic. This has nothing to do with seriousness. The comic can be very serious. The trouble with the earnest is that it seeks to be commended. It seeks to be praised for its intention more than for what it is saying.”

“The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.”

“The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.”