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 verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there’s a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry. ... poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.”
—Rita Dove (b. 1952)