How Does a Poem Mean? Quotes

“The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Poetry is man’s best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Good writing tends to present evidence rather than judgments. When the evidence is well presented, the reader’s judgments will agree with those implicit in the writing. But nothing is more disastrous to the communication between writer and reader than a series of implicit judgments with which the reader cannot agree or which he finds to be simply silly or for which he is given no evidence he can respect.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“What greater violence can be done to the poet’s experience than to drag it into an early morning classroom and to go after it as an item on its way to a Final Examination? …It is the experience, not the Final Examination, that counts.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Few pay attention to the histories and the root pictures words can release. These neglected qualities are there, however, and the poets have always found them a self-delighting source of excitement.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?