quotes from classic

I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

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Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

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I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

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I've never known where I'm going until I've gone and come back, and then it takes me ages to see what the trip was about.

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Let's say I live to be eighty - I'm seventy-one now - nothing I do between now and eighty is going to change the way people think about my poetry.

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If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

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In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world.

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I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and I'd get these genius ideas for novels and try to finish then in three or four days without going to sleep.

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I write what's given me to write.

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I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

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Detroit was just a Levine-size town.

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There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

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My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

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I think in the best poems I make a lot of discoveries about voice, about subject, about what my real feelings are.

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I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

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My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

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Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

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The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

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The death ... of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

more quotes from Edgar Allan Poe

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

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