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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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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I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers: O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
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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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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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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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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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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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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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Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
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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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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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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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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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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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Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
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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.
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