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
Wonderful
Useless
Gasp
Next
Tend
Nouns
Important
Cry
Adjectives
Every
Tough
Verbs
Things
Poet
Virtually
Like
Beginning
Hurts
Especially
Poems
Hurt
Addiction

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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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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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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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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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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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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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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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