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"However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird."

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"However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird."

Explore more quotes by Norman MacCaig

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"When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books."
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"When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous."
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"Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away."
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"And it's impossible for me to read Henry James."
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"I don't think of myself all the time."
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"I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense."
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"But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person."
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"But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they're very nice decor in a room - far better than paintings... That's not quite true!"
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"I find it's impossible for me to read Proust."
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"All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed."

Exlpore more Poetry quotes

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"I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more."

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"With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem."

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"Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind."

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"If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it."

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"That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been."

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"Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours."

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"Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess."

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"Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that."

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"There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas."

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"Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses."

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