Poem Quotes

Ooh, it's too embarrassing to share my innermost romantic secrets - although I have written Danielle the odd poem. If anything they are more comedic than romantic. They used to be well-received but that was before she started studying Shakespeare at drama college. Now I feel so inept.

To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative.

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

When I see great boxers, it's like reading a wonderful poem.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.

Every old poem is sacred.

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

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'm old enough, by a long shot, to remember going to the library and spending days researching. If I was looking for a line from a poem or something else I needed, that would be the trip I would have to take.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

If I felt, in the event of a royal wedding, inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I would just be grateful to have an idea for the poem. And if I didn't, I'd ignore it.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it's composition. If you don't understand what it's about, you're depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem.

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.

With the question of the effect of a poem, the topic of investigation shifts from that of textual autonomy to textual reception - to the issue of what we actually look for or find in reading a poem.