"It is no use thinking that writing..." - Quote by Mary Oliver
It is no use thinking that writing of poems - the actual writing - can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.
More by Mary Oliver
“I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.”
“In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.”
“I have trouble with some books because I'm so much in agreement with them I'd rather just sit in the grass myself.”
More on Writing
“I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.”
“For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”
“You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blunderingclod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,--but what am I to the truth I feebly utter?”
More on Poetry
“Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.”
“Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.”
“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”