Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
I entirely agree with you about the obscurity of Mrs Browning's line about the stars. It is far-fetched. She wanted to express something which she found beyond expression.
I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn't know that one could be a poet.
Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.
I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.
I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.