John Hollander

John Hollander (October 28, 1929 – August 17, 2013) was an American poet and literary critic.

Quotes

 * 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.
 * Quoted in 'Venerable Poets :Words to Pop Music beat 'by Cynthia Wolfe Boyton.


 * 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.
 * introduction-John Hollander ed.'Committed to Memory' Riverhead Books New York 1996 ISBN 1573226467


 * 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.
 * 'A Conversation with John Hollander' (by email) by Paul Devlin vol 1 St. John's University Humanities Review April 2003


 * 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.
 * Interview with J D McCarthy 'The Art of Poetry' no 35 Fall 1985


 * Metre is to rhythm as eye is to ear.
 * 'Vision and Resonance:Two senses of Poetic Form' OUP London 1975


 * English Prosody has tended to be a subject for cranks.
 * Derek Attridge 'Review of 'Vision and Resources' MLR vol.72 no 3 July 1977


 * 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.
 * Review of 'Stanley Cavell and the Claim to Reason' Critical Inquiry, vol 6, no 4 Summer 1980 U of C P


 * 'Poetic form' is a very deep matter that covers much more than phonological or typological pattern.
 * Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse, Fourth Edition


 * 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.
 * Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse, Fourth Edition


 * 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.
 * Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse, Fourth Edition


 * The blueprints of verse can be used to build things made of literal, or nonpoetic material, which is why most verse is not poetry.
 * Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse, Fourth Edition


 * The building blocks of poetry itself are elements if fiction -fable, 'image', metaphor-all the material if the nonliteral.
 * 'Rhyme's Reason':a guide to English Verse Yale University Press, 1981


 * 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.
 * 'Poetry' September 1995

Poetry Quotes

 * 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
 * Extract-last verse from 'An Old Fashioned Song' in 'Tesserae and other poems' (1993)


 * 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
 * Extract from 'Powers of Thirteen'(1983)

Quotes about Hollander

 * Hollander's poems span the full range of human emotions and must be counted among the most sophisticated productions of the human mind.
 * 'A Conversation with John Hollander' Interview(by email) Paul Devlin vol 1, St. John's University Humanities Review April 2003


 * Since he (Hollander) is a poet himself..he conveyed a passion for that knowledge as a source of current inspiration.
 * Karl Kirchway,' At Yale, lessons in writing and life' NY Times October 15 ,2010