A Quote by Irving Layton

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats

Irving Layton

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Am Best Genius Keats Poems Shakespeare Survive Will Wordsworth Written

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Irving Layton
Canadian - Poet
March 12, 1912 - January 4, 2006

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

Irving Layton

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

Thom Gunn

I believe strongly in what John Keats called negative capability: the trait or practice that allows a poet to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. For Keats, William Shakespeare exemplified negative capability, and I do think it's extraordinary that for all the thousands of pages Shakespeare left behind, we really don't know much about Shakespeare's own personality or opinions.

James Arthur

I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

Sylvia Plath

Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.

Jane Campion

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

Aravind Adiga

Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.

Andrew Motion

If you like poetry let it be first rate, Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith Pope (if you will though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth and Southey. Now Ellen don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare, and Byron. Both these were great Men and their works are like themselves, You will know how to chuse the good and avoid the evil, the finestpassages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting you will never wish to read them over twice.

Charlotte Bronte

If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently?

James Arthur

I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.

Carolyn Kizer

If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

Andrew Motion

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Matthea Harvey

But Shakespeare knows what the sphinx thinks, if anybody does. His genius is penetrative as cold midwinter entering every room, and making warmth shiver in ague fits. I think Shakespeare never errs in his logical sequence in character. He surprises us, seems unnatural to us, but because we have been superficial observers; while genius will disclose those truths to which we are blind.

William Alfred Quayle

If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough.

Jane Campion

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.