Quote

I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that every happened to you.

Donald Hall

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Time
Notion
Absolutely
Lived
Happened
Comes
Everything
Every
Long
Poem

More quotes by Donald Hall

Image
Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.
Donald Hall
Image
Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
Donald Hall
Image
Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
Donald Hall
Image
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
Donald Hall
Image
If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.
Donald Hall
Image
I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
Donald Hall
Image
The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
Donald Hall
Image
Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
Donald Hall
Image
I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
Donald Hall
Image
Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.
Donald Hall
Image
To grow old is to lose everything.
Donald Hall
Image
Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
Donald Hall
Image
Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
Donald Hall
Image
Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
Donald Hall
Image
Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
Donald Hall
Image
I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
Donald Hall
Image
For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.
Donald Hall
Image
The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
Donald Hall
Image
Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you by that time, you ought to have them right.
Donald Hall
Image
If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.
Donald Hall