Advice To Young Poets—Quotes

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place — in this culture — to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best.
— Maxine Kumin

. . . the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its
lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely
sensitive decapitated frog. It is hemisphereless poetry.
—Bliss Perry

A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets, and they ought to know better.
— Richard Hugo

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
— Donald Hall

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.
— James Dickey

There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. “Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do.” . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.
— Erica Jong, 26

On solemn asses fall plush sinecures,
So keep a straight face and sit tight on yours.
— X. J. Kennedy, To A Young Poet

A young poet must discover who he is, he must create himself as a poet. Even a genius must do this. It's a painful process, splitting out your own skin and squeezing your soul and body out of it, even, sometimes, before you know the shape of color of the new self you are going to become.
— Daniel Hoffman

---

If I were a literary Pope sending out an Encyclical, I would tell these inexperienced young persons [who have literary aspirations] that nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.. . . .[N]obody except editors and school teachers and here and there a literary man knows how common is the capacity of rhyming and prattling in readable prose, especially among young women of a certain degree of education. In my character of Pontiff, I should tell these young persons that most of them labored under a delusion. It is very hard to believe it; one feels so full of intelligence and so decidedly superior to one's dull relations and schoolmates; one writes so easily and the lines sound so prettily to one's self; there are such felicities of expression, just like those we hear quoted from the great poets; and besides one has been told by so many friends that all one had to do was to print and be famous! Delusion, my poor dear, delusion, at least nineteen times out twenty, yes, ninety-nine times in a hundred.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

There are several more careers more engaging to follow than that of poetry. But the circumstances of one's birth, the conduct of one's parents, the current economic structure of society, and a thousand other local factors have as much or more to say about successions to such occupations, the naive volitions of the poet to the contrary.
— Hart Crane

Being a poet is living twice as intensely as an ordinary man; it's like having four eyes, four ears, and four hands, the better to see, hear, and feel the wonders nature has created for us. So while I do not advise you to marry a poet whose only job is writing poetry — because any editor will tell you that nowadays poetry is profitable only in the form of song lyrics — you should nevertheless try to select as your life companion a man who will be capable of taking you by the hand to admire the moonlight on the evening of a televised boxing match, or one whose mind is occasionally elevated above the usual masculine preoccupations — ice-cold martinis, rising sales curves, and good golf scores — in order to talk about the Roman de la Rose or, more prosaically, about the changing color of your eyes.
— Genevieve Antoine Dariaux

Advice to poets from Jean Cocteau:
“Find out what you do best, and then don't do it.”
— as recollected by James Dickey

 The poet is he who, not having anything to do, finds something to do.
— somebody quoted by Dickey

A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.
— James Dickey

I believe that the American poet ought to be a tough son of a bitch.  He sought to hold his own in this culture on his own terms and not compromise under any circumstances.
— James Dickey

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet.
Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.
— Erica Jong

As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.
— Kenneth Rexroth

This class struggle plays hell with your poetry.
— John Reed

If what you are looking for is social recognition, intimacy, ease of the pangs of loneliness, poetry is like bad breath. It drives people further away. If you can get anyone to read it (which isn't easy, outside a poetry club), you find that they don't understand you any better. Maybe they misunderstand you more. At best it is a lonely activity—not only writing it, but all the requirements of learning to write it: studying reading poetry of the past, analyzing techniques, and staying aware of contemporary literary currents.
— Judson Jerome

If you've got to write a poem,
And you haven't a thought,
And your tummy's got the jitters,
And your tongue in throat is caught,
And your brow is sort of sweaty,
And your hand can't make a start,
There is just one place to find a pome:
Child, look into your heart.
— Myrtle Wimple (Judson Jerome)
 
 

Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one
No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.
Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.
— Richard Hugo

You may . . . make a little recreation of poetry, in the midst of your painful studies. Nevertheless, I cannot but advise you. Withhold thy throat from thirst. Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. . . . let not the Circean cup intoxicate you.
— Cotton Mather

There are rituals
not structures
for being a poet,
drinking too much, taking too many drugs,
being a lady chaser, having your nervous breakdown,
being irresponsible about money.
— Diane Wakoski

If you take shit and show it to some guy
and he says “This Sucks”
you gotta say, fuck you man,
you're full of shit I'm a Poet.
— Attributed to Gregory Corso,
in Anne Waldman's
Helping the Dreamer

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion,
love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be.
But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing,
detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing.
If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states,
Poetry would lack something.
— WH Auden

In my daydream College for Bards, the curriculum would be as follows:

1) In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
2) Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.
3) The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.
4) Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
5) Every student would be required to look after a domestic animal and cultivate a garden plot.
— W. H. Auden

If a poet should ask me how I make a poem
I should say
I've always wondered myself.

If Ilse asked me how I make a poem
I should tell her
It is a very complicated and arcane process
In simplest analogy
it is rather like making a pterodactyl pie
First you mix your piecrust
using plenty of shortening
roll it yet keep it crisp and flaky
Then you plant an acorn
When the oak is fully grown
you lime its branches
and lie in wait for it to catch a pterodactyl.
— Ramon Guthrie

To make a poem, take one newspaper,
one pair of scissors,
snip the words one by one and put them in a bag.
Shake gently, draw them out at random,
and copy them conscientiously. . . DADA est mort.
DADA est idiot. Vive DADA!
— Tristan Tzara

Bad poets imitate; good poets steal.
— T. S. Eliot q by Roethke

 

Don't be sucked in by the su-superior,
don't swallow the culture bait,
don't drink, don't drink and get beerier and beerier,
do learn to discriminate.
— DH Lawrence

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous,
He must die a little death each morning,
He must swallow his toad and study his vomit
as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.
— Delmore Schwartz
 
 

Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. Let not what should be sauce, rather than food for you, engross all your application. Beware of a boundless and sickly appetite for the reading of poems which the nation now swarms withal; and let not the Circaen cup intoxicate you.  But especially preserve the chastity of your soul from the dangers you may incur, by a conversation with muses no better than harlots.
— Cotton Mather

What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry — but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.
— G. K Chesterton

Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.
— A.E. Housman

A first-rate limerick needs the humorous touch of Robert Benchley, the mordant wit of Oscar Wilde, the shock value of and x-rated film.  So potent is the limerick's secret power that many hostesses forbid it, for once the guests start telling limericks, it is goodbye to gossip, ecology, politics and furtive dalliance in the kitchen or greenhouse.
— Clifford M. Crist

How to

You labor from midnight to morn,
Consuming a gallon of corn.
The last line comes neatly,
You pass out completely,
And thus is a limerick born.
— Anon

A Poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
— Robert Frost

The finest cowboy poems rarely cut it on the printed page. They must be recited the way they are written, from the noggin, with feeling. They're like fine wine. They must breathe, especially if they've been bottled up too long.
— David J. Swift

Poetry is engendered in solitude,
so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?
— Edward Hoagland
 
 

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and — if he is lucky enough — know the love of an honest woman.
— Robert Graves

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself
is almost sure to please others.
— Marianne Moore

Don't put things off till it's too late.
You are the DJ of your fate.
— Vikram Seth

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
— Stanley Kunitz,

An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
— Stanley Kunitz

Your feengers need dees-ee-pleene.
— Andre Segovia told Carl Sandburg after hearing Sandburg play the guitar

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.
— Henry David Thoreau
 
 

When you set about your composing, it may be necessary for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes, and the worse the better; for an author, like a limbeck, will yield the better for having a rag about him: besides that, I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it) to make it bear well; and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad.
— Swift

In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems,
but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence:
Have no debasing thoughts.
— Confucius

I would advise no man to attempt the writing of verse except he cannot help it, and if he cannot it is in vain to dissuade him from it.
— Matthew Prior

If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else,
either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush;
and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself.
Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.
— Robert Graves

Schoolchildren all over America are told to write to authors—often to authors whom they have never before heard of, whose work they are to young to understand in the least, and often in letters which are almost illiterate. If children are to be taught to respect the work of American poets I think some better way might be found to do so— some way which would not make such an inconsiderate demand on the author's time.
— Conrad Aiken

Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love.
— Richard Hugo
 
 

When I was very young, a poet whom I will leave unnamed said to me, “Levine, if you fuck more than once every ten days you won't ever amount to anything as a poet.” Well, that just seemed like hocus-pocus to me and it still does.
— Philip Levine

I urge this upon young poets when they ask me. Be patient with your careers and with your poems. It is fatal to rush the process.
— Paul Zimmer

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up,
All out of shape from toe to top.
— Yeats

Hang the bard, and cut the punster,
Fling all rhyming to the deuce,
Take a business tour through Munster,
Shoot a landlord — be of use.
— Richard D'Alton in Williams (1822-1862), “Advice to a Young Poet”

Destroy the Museums. Crack syntax. Sabotage the adjective. Leave nothing but the verb.
— Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (one of founders of Dadaism)

Yeats, you need ten years in the library, but I have need of ten years in the wilderness.
— Lionel Johnson

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.
— Stanley Kunitz

Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge.
— Charles Lamb, letter to Coleridge 11-8-1796

You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of complicated state of mind.
The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
— WS Gilbert
 
 

I think it's better if you write poems that look like you.
— Richard Hugo

There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.
— WH Auden

Say it no ideas but in things
—William Carlos Williams

And say it, no “poetry” but in poems.
— Hugh Kenner

We should be better advised to acknowledge frankly that, when people put poems in our hands (point to pictures, or play us music), what we say in nine cases out of ten, has nothing to do with the poem, but arises from politeness or spleen or some other social motive. which we produce on these occasions were universally recognized to be what it is, social gesture, “phatic communion.”. emptying his mind by any literary highwayman who says, “I want your opinion,” and much too easily laid low because he has nothing to produce on these occasions.  He might be comforted if he knew how many professionals make a point of carrying stocks of imitation currency, crisp and bright, which satisfy the highwayman and are all that even the wealthiest critic in these emergencies can supply.
— I. A. Richards/ Practical Criticism

Lower the standards: that's my motto. Somebody is always putting the food out of reach. we're tired of falling off ladders. Who says a child can't paint? A pro is somebody who does it for money. Lower the standards. Let's all play poetry.

Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs.
— Karl Shapiro

When Elizabeth Bishop agreed to teach a poetry workshop for the first time (1966), she was dismayed. Her students didn't know anything but the urge to “discover” or “express” themselves. So she sat them difficult metrical exercises, insisting: “You should have your head filled with poems all the time, until they almost get in your way.”
— Harold Beaver

The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.
— Robert Graves

Good poets write poems that correspond with how they themselves talk; or, at least, how they would talk if they had the perfect gift of extemporary speech; they avoid inversions, oddities and rhetoric, and coin a striking phrase only when it is forced from them. If a poet, called upon to read his poems, chants or croons or declaims, something is wrong. A true poem is best spoken in a level, natural voice: slowly or solemnly, and with suppressed emotion, but in a natural voice. The voice addressed to intimate friends: not the one in which we try to curry favour with children at a party, or with an election crowd, or with a traffic cop, or with a suspicious Alsatian bitch growling over her litter.
— Robert Graves

The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself—which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.
— Robert Graves

Poems, like bank-clerks, should be neat and bland.
— George Barker

It is an author's primary duty to entertain.
Sling out all the philosophical terms, but keep the reader turning the page.
— Susan Howatch

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems—especially wonderful tough monosyllables like “gasp” and “cry.” Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.
— Donald Hall

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly— and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
— Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Poetry is probably the one field of writing in which it is a mistake to try to psych out editors. In fact, specific marketing advice can sometimes harm the novice poet by enticing him to pursue fashions. The poet's best hope is to sound like nobody else, The finest, most enduring poetry constructs a marketplace of its own.
— X. J. Kennedy

Be brief, be buoyant, and be brilliant.
— Brander Matthews

Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
— Samuel Johnson

Imagination in a poet is a faculty so wild and lawless that, like a high ranging spaniel, it must have clogs tied to it, lest it outrun the judgment. The great easiness of blank verse renders the poet too luxuriant. He is tempted to say many things which might better be omitted, or, at least shut up in fewer words.
— John Dryden

A poem is no place for an idea.
— E. W. Howe

Advice to a Young Person About to Write a Book with No Equipment Other Than Talent

Anachronistic stripling,
If you would see your name
In living letters rippling
Across the scroll of fame,
Then shun those regions airy
Where geniuses are made,
Lay down the dictionary,
And learn another trade.
— Phyllis McGinley

You really ought to try to sleep, Porphyro,
even though in this town poetry's a
bedroom occupation.
— Hart Crane

. . .verseward plod thy weary way
— Byron

Sing for the garish eye,
When moonless brandlings cling!
Let the froddering crooner cry,
And the braddled sapster sing.
— W. S. Gilbert

Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: “Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!”
— Donald Hall

The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion.
— Walt Whitman

Advice to poets from Jean Cocteau:
“Find out what you do best, and then don't do it.”
— as recollected by James Dickey

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous.
There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.
— James Dickey

On the one hand, I have wanted to supply documentation on myself by including material relevant to my emotions and ideas in my youth; and, on the other, not to let myself down by publishing inferior material. My poetry comes under the latter head. My only advice to the reader is to skip any verse that he sees coming.
— Edmund Wilson

Be simple, Ezra, be simple!
— Djuna Barnes to Ezra Pound

There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. “Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do.” . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.
— Erica Jong

We will venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture £50 upon anything he can write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to `plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,' &c. But for Heaven's sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.
— From review of John Keats' poems in Blackwood's

A young poet in America should not be advised at the outset to give up all for the Muse—to seclude himself in the country, to live hand from mouth in Greenwich Village or to escape to the Riviera. I should not advise him even to become a magazine editor or work in a publisher's office. The poet would do better to study a profession, to become a banker or a public official or even to go in for the movies.
— Edmund Wilson
 
 

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world— unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn't.

It's the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

— EE Cummings

One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is
“Whatever you do, don't be boring.”
— Anne Sexton

English Professor Arlo Bates to WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
who was asking him whether to quit medicine and write or go on with medicine:
“I can see you have a sensitive appreciation of the work of John Keats's line and form.
You have done some credible imitations of his work. Not bad.
Perhaps in twenty years, yes, in perhaps twenty years (this was November, 1905)
you may succeed in attracting some attention to yourself. Perhaps!
Meanwhile, go on with your medical studies.”
— William Carlos Williams

I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written — once, in short, he has learnt his trade — that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.
— Philip Larkin

Tell the truth, but tell it slant—
— Emily Dickinson, q by Philip Larkin

When I am asked by young poets what advice I have to offer them about the conduct of their lives, I am inclined to warn them about the dangers of hothouse anemia. “Do something else, ” I tell them, “develop any other skill to turn to any other branch of knowledge. Learn how to use your hands. Try woodworking, birdwatching, gardening, sailing, weaving, pottery, archaeology, oceanography, spelunking, animal husbandry, — take your pick. Whatever activity you engage in, as a trade or hobby or field study, will tone up your body and clear your head. at the very least it will help you with your metaphors.”
— Stanley Kunitz

Advice to a poet who would win prizes:
Step carefully around this ruin
and that rickety tower
lest you topple their gods.
— Lawrence Lipton

Be obscure clearly.
— E. B. White

Scheme not to make what's Another's your own;
Be not a Dog for the sake of a Bone.
— Arthur Guiterman

We should nourish our souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well.
— Logan Pearsall Smith

A bard may chaunt too often and too long.
— Byron

Note here. When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.
— Kipling

The urge to write literature
is deeply inviting.
Real writers avoid it
and aim to write writing.
— MW

To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance—not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and leave you more free time to write.
— Richard Hugo

I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity.
— John Berryman

What shall I do to become a good writer? First disabuse yourself of the national idea that genius is a capacity for hard work. . . . The meaning of genius is that it doesn't have to work to attain what people without it must labour for — and not attain.

Yes, but what shall I do?

Use a little lip rouge, to begin with. Beauty may bring you experiences to write about.
—Margaret Anderson, advice to a young girl with no talent and “with gaunt eyes and the earnestness that would prevent anyone from achieving anything”.

 

DIE in the past.
Live in the future.
— Mina Loy

Poetry must be as new as foam & old as rock.
— Delmore Schwartz

You can't escape the puking sphinx.
— Frank Zappa

“Look into thy heart and write!” is good advice,
but not if interpreted to mean, “Look nowhere else!”
The poet should know his world and, so far as his art is concerned,
any kind of battering from his world is better than
his own self-indulgent brooding.
— Harriet Monroe

Advice to New Poets (of the New Millenium)

When editors reject you flat
Write a poem about a cat.
If you gather more rejections
Write a poem about erections.
— Gail White, Poultry, 2nd series, #11, 7
 
 

Habitation

Lucidist Manifesto

Worden Report

Type-A Poet

For more quotes on poetry see:

POW!

©1999, 2000 Mark Worden, Morris Street Writers Group