Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.
We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.
Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.
More modern poetry is written than read.
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.
I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets.