Cut quarrels out of literature and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen a lot of them will.

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is you need to talk with children to teachers and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

The crown of literature is poetry.

The Bible should be taught but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction myth poetry anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

To make a love story you need a couple of young people but to reflect on the nature of love you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Pop changes week to week month to month. But great music is like literature.