James Schuyler

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it’s impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

However, intention needn’t enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don’t see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem.

It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).

One tends to write beyond what’s needed.

To change your phrase somewhat, I know that I like an art where disparate elements form an entity.

In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.

Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself.