Edward Byrne

“In the first place, pastoral archetypally situates itself in an idealized and artificial landscape. Whether in the Greek Arcady often invok...

I am pleased to note the following press release distributed today by Valparaiso University’s office of public relations: Professor’s poetry...

“I remember that in the spring of 1949 there was a symposium on the arts at Harvard during which a number of new works were performed includ...

“What I share with my friends is ambition; what I dispute is its definition. I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem...

“After a certain period, the poem seems to have no maker at all. Poems gather their own momentum and you feel they’re moving on their own. Y...

“Inspired by Rousseau, the Romantics took lyric back from the Overculture. Returning it to its ancient and honorable identity as personal ly...

“Language, Whitman argued, must express the multiplicity of habits, heritages, and races that make up the American nationality: ‘The immense...

“September 11 provides ample opportunity for poets to diminish their ethical standing by generalizing. Again, like the experience of being i...

“Look, a poem either sends you a bill or writes you a check. You can use up too much of your intellectual and emotional capital, not to ment...

“Creative writing programs have made American poetry more regionally and socially diverse: once, most American poets came from a few east co...

“I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language ...

“Pound was a catalyst to other poets. His presence made poets out of people who might otherwise never have survived into poetry. Greatly as ...

“The master class I gave had a rocky moment. I told them to copy poems out, and to start by saying what they actually wanted to say, and to ...

“The daring imagination of John Berryman in Dream Songs , and to a lesser degree in the Sonnets , is constantly en route between the bizarre...

“Our modern American poetry has a snarl on its hands. Something earth-shaking was started about fifty years ago by the generation of Eliot, ...

“Everybody understands that poems and stories are written by memory and desire, love and hatred, daydreams and nightmares—by a being, not a ...

“To approach the practice of poetry as an acquiring of skills sets may provide the stability of a curriculum, but the source of inspirati...