no box

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

—Marianne Moore, National Book Award acceptance speech (1952)

deep down things

And for all this, nature is never spent;
     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1899), "God's Grandeur," 1918

body and soul

What the soul does for the body so does the poet for her people.

—Gabriela Mistral, inscription on her tomb. From Marjorie Agosin’s introduction to Gabriela Mistral: A Reader (White Pine Press, 1993), translated by Maria Giachetti.

to get bread

The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread…

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1876, (Houghton Mifflin, 1910)

confused epoch

...it is not necessary, because an epoch is confused, that its poets should share its confusions.

—Robinson Jeffers, "Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years"

bric-a-brac

"The trouble with you, Robert, is that you're too academic," said Stevens. "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you're too executive," retorted Frost. "The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects." "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac."

—Lawrence Roger Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938 (Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970), p. 61, recounting an exchange between Stevens & Frost in Key West in 1940.

machine of words

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.

—William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New Directions, 1954) p. 256

how does a poem mean

For WHAT DOES THE POEM MEAN? is too often a self-destroying approach to poetry. A more useful way of asking the question is HOW DOES A POEM MEAN? Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning? As Yeats wrote:

        body swayed to music, O quickening glance,
        How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?

What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself.

—John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? (Houghton Mifflin, 1960)