Kenneth Koch Quotes on Literature (16 Quotes)

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

I think my poetry was very influenced-it seems almost dumb to say it-but it was very influenced by Shakespeare. Very early on I read his plays... and, I don't know, I started speaking in blank verse at a rather early age.

When I was 18 years old I had to go in the Army-it was World War II-and I didn't write very much at first, but when I was actually in combat in the Philippines I managed to write a few poems. It was reassuring to be able to write poems while I was in this terrible war.

My poetry changed when I was 15 years old. One of my uncles, Leo, had written poetry when he was a young man, and he took me down to the family business and he opened a safe and showed me some poems he'd written when he was 19. He also gave me a book of the collected poems of Shelley. And I still have that book.

I suppose that... it's really hard to tell... I mean, certainly the brightness, the dash, the excitement, the sort of self-confidence of the hand on the canvas-all that was exciting. It's hard to say how it influenced my poetry.

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.

I mean, there are excesses all over the place. People are always saying what are the different schools of American poetry.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

Some people who write about poetry seem to have had trouble with my poetry because it is sometimes comic. I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical, but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.

It's not that I was indifferent ot the horrors of war, because that's what inspired the poem to a large extent, but I couldn't write about them.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

I simply was ignoring the fact that The Waste Land indeed made it seem to many poets that one had to be depressed-not that The Waste Land is a bad poem, it's a wonderful poem-that one had to feel despair, that one had to think that the modern world was te

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.

Here I was in my 20s, and life seemed to me so exciting and full of girls and gardens and steamships and drinks and tennis games and countries and cathedrals... I mean, it seemed absurd to be writing these drab, depressed little poems. I knew there were things like death and poverty and injustice, but they weren't everything.