A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
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.
There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.
A writer doesn't write about just anything. He writes about things he has an affinity for.
A writer without a reader doesn't exist.
I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
No opposing quotes found.