Browsing Topic Best American Poetry Quotes

Do not go gentle into that good night.

I’m educating myself more about world poetry. I know a lot about contemporary American poetry, so I felt I needed to learn more about figures like Borges, Akhmatova, Neruda, etc. I felt I needed a bigger lens to see poetry through. It really helps to see poetry as a world language, and not just something American.

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one’s right to be different and often to break taboos.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one’s geographic landscape, sometimes out of one’s cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

Someone said, in a simplistic way maybe, that all American poetry is either cooked or raw, and if it’s cooked, it comes from Poe.

Kerouac: You’re ruining American poetry, O’Hara. O’Hara: That’s more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

Robert Creeley has forged a signature style in American poetry, an idiosyncratic, highly elliptical, syntactical compression by which the character of his mind’s concentrated and stumbling proposals might be expressed … Reading his poems, we experience the gnash of arriving through feeling at thought and word.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

I have always loved American poetry, which is very different from Irish poetry.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But there’s no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.

American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.