Quote

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like gasp and cry. Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

Donald Hall

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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Important
Cry
Adjectives
Every
Tough
Verbs
Things
Poet
Virtually
Like
Beginning
Hurts
Especially
Poems
Hurt
Addiction
Wonderful
Useless
Gasp
Next
Tend
Nouns

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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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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.
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Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
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The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
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If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.
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Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
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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.
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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.
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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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.
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I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
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Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!
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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
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Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.
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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.
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