Comments on Poetry

"There is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem. [. . .] The truth is, sometimes poetry is embarrassingly easy to write. Just about every poet admits to some simultaneous feeling of helplessness and unaccostumed power in writing of his best poems, some element of mystery. "If you do not believe in poetry," Wallace Stevens once wrote, "you cannot write it," and indeed this is the chief "difficulty" in poetry, that it comes so infrequently that it remains beyond our will." - Christian Wiman

"But even the most dull-witted author was obliged to realize that his freely associating the work of art [informal poetry] - proudly meaningless, although really meaning everything - would have no readers unless it had its moments. Whether in a formal poem or in an informal one, everything depended and still depends, on the quality of the moment. Formality and informality are just two different ways of joining the moments up. The question will always be about which is superior, and the "always" strongly suggests that neither of them is. Whatever kind of poem it is, it's the moment that gets you." - Clive James