A Quote by William Collins

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.

William Collins

Quote Topics

Humor Call Comedies Essential Mean Nothing Part Poetry Prior Shakespeare Them Wordsworth

Quote Author

William Collins
English - Poet
December 25, 1721 - June 12, 1759

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

I remember when humor was gentle pokes. I used to call it 'arm around the shoulder' humor. Now they go for the jugular and they take no prisoners. It's mean, mean stuff.

Robert Orben

I really wasn't raised with much religion. I mean we practice kind of the basic tradition, but for me it was always more of a cultural thing and that's a part of me and my ancestry that I always loved. I mean, I think that a lot of my humor is 'Jewish humor' at its root. And so culturally I love that part of myself.

Randy Rainbow

One good way to start writing poetry is to read all kinds of poetry: not just in order to imitate but to fill up your head with it, to absorb it, to make poetry an essential part of how you view the world.

Valerie Worth

What I wrote all the time when I was a kid - I don't want to call it 'poetry,' because it wasn't poetry. I was not that kind of a writer. I was a rhymer. I was a fan of Dorothy Parker's, so maybe I wrote poetry to that extent, but my main focus was the humor of it, and word construction, and the slant. Your words, it's a very powerful experience.

Carrie Fisher

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

Irving Layton

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

Irving Layton

I don't often watch broad comedies and think, "Oh well, I could have been a part of that." It's usually the opposite. I usually watch them, enjoy them, admire them, and think, "You know, I really have nothing to contribute to that".

Eric Bana

I think I love humor in poetry, but not that slapstick cheap easy humor, but that uncomfortable, "did she say that out loud?" kind of humor.

Victoria Chang

I have no idea, actually, where I fit in, in terms of poetry camps. At AWP conferences, I have been on panels about humor, collaboration, visual poetry, confessional poetry, gender, and the body, as well as tributes to Edward Field and Albert Goldbarth. I felt at home on all of them - most poets straddle more than one school.

Denise Duhamel

I went to drama school. I'm classically trained; I studied Shakespeare, blah blah blah. But I always preferred to do Oscar Wilde, or Shakespeare's comedies over his dramas.

Elizabeth Banks

With humor you have so many options with topics and length, I mean I can write humor essays in books now and they can be as long as I want them to be.

Dave Barry

The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry.

W. S. Merwin

A part of what makes myths live is their multiplicity, the way different voices retell them in every generation. Homer survives because his poetry was outstanding, yes, but also because he's been passed down by so many by luminaries like Vergil and Ovid, Shakespeare, James Joyce and Margaret Atwood, but also by countless others. I wanted to do my part for these tremendous stories.

Madeline Miller

I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then.