Poetry
As a high-school senior, Ford cited Shakespeare, Longfellow, and Millay as his favorite writers. Two strong influences were mentors from his college days, the Arkansas poet laureate Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni and the professor and antiquarian W. J. Lemke.
Ford's mature poetry was mostly in meter and rhyme. A student of his work has noted that his college poems were often about death; his Army poems, about the spiritual death that he saw as a soldier in occupied Germany. Many of his later subjects were drawn from rural Arkansas. His work often featured striking phrases such as "old corn-cribs/ Lean upon the muscle of the air."
Read more about this topic: Edsel Ford (poet)
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning “When” are much more numerous than those beginning “Where” of “If.” As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.”
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“Always in England if you had the type of brain that was capable of understanding T.S. Eliot’s poetry or Kant’s logic, you could be sure of finding large numbers of people who would hate you violently.”
—D.J. Taylor (b. 1960)
“Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)