Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I … - Billy Collins

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Quote of the day

Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.

Billy Collins

Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.

Clever, Guess, Guilty, Interesting, Knowing, Reading

Same Author Quotes

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.

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But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

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A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

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Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.

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But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

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