John Hollander

"Poetry may be written on paper, but it’s an oral art.A good poem satisfies the ear .It creates a story or picture that grabs you."

"Rhythm and repetition of sounds, words and phrases make spoken poetry sound different to ordinary discourse."

"Reading a poem aloud by someone who understands it, can be a crucial experience, but better yet is reading it aloud oneself."

"Reciting a poem aloud, you are not like an actor, rather you come to understand, then to be, the voice of the poem itself."

"The more you understand a poem and its complexities and depth, the more you will be able to do when reading it aloud."

"Central also to reading verse aloud is the handling of enjambment, ..the interplay of line-end and sentence-flow."

"Contrastive stress is very important in English, as poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts of this kind."

"Not being a philosopher I've had to work through my feelings and puzzlements in poems."

"A teacher (of poetry) has to know and feel what poetry is , and be able - and this is crucial- to read it aloud effectively."

"I revise very little. I always write in long hand and revise when I type. I test them out when I read them aloud."

"Inspiration comes within a framework. A poem that gets out of hand is not a poem."

"I usually seem to finish a poem when I write it down. I may have been carrying the notion around in my head."

"I find free verse very, very difficult to write."

"Great poems are all fables about life."

"Ultimately poetic thought is interpretive."

"You can teach the writing of verse..like prose..an instrument..and the recognition of true poetry. The rest, writers must teach themselves."

"Metre is to rhythm as eye is to ear."

"English Prosody has tended to be a subject for cranks."

"The warfare between poetry and philosophy certainly started with Plato, who was both poet and philosopher."

"Major poetry not only 'employs' metaphor, irony and other tropes (and is of them) but always and explicitly or implicitly considers the nature of the trope itself."

"For the poet, the biblical sense of 'know' is as much part of nature as the heat of fire, and in the cognative sense as much a given phenomonen as the brightness itself."

"The large (in English) unphilosophical, 'poetic' or 'religious' questions are elicited from their precise and technical microcosms."

"One crosses the brink of literalness into poetry by desiring , noticing, fixing on something and wondering what to make of it."

"'Poetic form' is a very deep matter that covers much more than phonological or typological pattern."

"Poetic form, as we know it, is an abstraction from, or residue of musical form.... The ghost of oral poetry never vanishes...all poetry was originally oral."

"The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design."

"The blueprints of verse can be used to build things made of literal, or nonpoetic material, which is why most verse is not poetry."

"The building blocks of poetry itself are elements if fiction -fable, 'image', metaphor-all the material if the nonliteral."

"Very few writers of verse can read their work to keep their listeners aware of the beauty of sense, that sense of beauty from the powerful , delicate ways in which sense is made by poetry."

"We and the trees and the way Back from the fields of play Lasted as long as we could No more walks in the wood"

"Winter wields only the spades, Summer brandishes Hot, black clubs, Spring shower hearts about and Autumn shows A fall of diamonds in our climate of extremes"

"Hollander's poems span the full range of human emotions and must be counted among the most sophisticated productions of the human mind."

"Since he (Hollander) is a poet himself..he conveyed a passion for that knowledge as a source of current inspiration."