A Quote by I. A. Richards
It is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is.
Related Quotes
The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.
In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.
The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."
From a philosophical perspective, I want to fight off isolationism and protectionism, be it part of another voice out there that says, wait a minute, what matters to women in Afghanistan matters to America. An isolationist point of view says it doesn't matter. The articulation of "all life matters" helps frame the case that it does matter what happens to a woman in Afghanistan.
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.
I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.
[The publication of his first poem] was wonderful ... but it taught me early on that the only thing that really matters is writing the next poem. Publication is best seen as a happy accident.
I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on the reader's mood. That's why negative capability matters; if the poet stops short of fully controlling each poem's meaning, the reader can make the poem his or her own.
Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem.
The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the image simply arrived. But surely such a thing has happened. And it matters to me that it has, or could.
Politically, foreign policy never matters until it matters, and then it matters a lot.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.
What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up
Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.
Related Authors
Aldous Huxley Quotes
English
Writer
Alexander Pope Quotes
English
Poet
Charles Caleb Colton Quotes
English
Writer
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
D. H. Lawrence Quotes
English
Writer
Douglas Adams Quotes
English
Writer
Francis Bacon Quotes
English
Philosopher
Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
English
Writer
J. K. Rowling Quotes
English
Author
J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes
English
Writer
John Lennon Quotes
English
Musician
John Milton Quotes
English
Poet
Richard Dawkins Quotes
English
Scientist
Samuel Johnson Quotes
English
Writer
Terry Pratchett Quotes
English
Author
William Shakespeare Quotes
English
Playwright