Donald Hall Quotes
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I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
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For better or worse, poetry is my life.
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Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.
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But the form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
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When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date.
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In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
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Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.
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Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad.
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New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
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I write longhand; I make changes longhand, and I have an assistant who types it up. She lives 70 yards away. Every afternoon, I have a case I leave out on the porch, and she brings it back the next morning.
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I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.
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I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.
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When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being.
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In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.
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It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not 'pass away.'
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Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.
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Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.
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It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
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I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times.
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A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s.
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One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.
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However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.
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My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down.
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Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.