not innocent

Great poems are innocent of neither ideas nor technique. But poetry which becomes ideas or techniques has diluted to the danger point the process of poetry. As a poet advances in sophistication and technique, this danger dogs him.

—Josephine Jacobsen, The Instant of Knowing (The Library of Congress lecture, undated pamphlet)

soap-bubble line

Think your sentences before you write them; otherwise they are like the continuous bumps of bubbly soap that used to be left in the bowl instead of becoming the iridescent globes desired by the pipes of our childhood. A line of poetry is an iridescent soap-bubble.

(March 1, 1949, Letters to Marcel Béalu)

—Max Jacob, Hesitant Fire (U. of Nebraska Press, 1991), selected prose of Max Jacob, translated and edited by Moishe Black and Maria Green

not poet

Every poet must, I think, feel a bit uneasy when receiving honours, because he knows that like the label poet itself—even more so—they have nothing to do with being a poet and writing poetry. A poet is only a poet when he is writing poetry, and when his is writing poetry least of all does he know that he is a poet. In fact, usually the attempt to write poetry makes him painfully aware that he isn’t.

—Stephen Spender, Chaos and Control in Poetry (The Library of Congress, pamphlet, 1966)

metre-making argument

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"