Michael Schmidt (poet)

Michael Schmidt (born 2 March 1947 in Mexico City) is a Mexican-British poet, author and scholar. He is currently Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University.

Lives of the Poets, Phoenix, 1988

 * Poetry is a language with a shape
 * We read with our ears
 * What matters in poetry is form, how words work together, the sounds and silences their combinations make. The ordered effects they produce on the attentive hearer.


 * A living poem can energise another poem at five hundred years distance, or across the other side of the world.

Reading Modern Poetry, London, 1989

 * Poetry is a collaborative art, and yet—as it is being created—the most solitary and 'individual' of activities.


 * Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it.

The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006

 * Prose and poetry are different in construction. You can lie back and read prose, and you can read it fast. Poetry on the other hand, requires a different kind of attention and concentration … the effect it has on the ear and the imagination.


 * Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it.


 * The reader does not need a technical vocabulary to read poetry, only a voice in the head or out loud which can deliver the sounds.


 * In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.