Poem Quotes

A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

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

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

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.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

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.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

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.

But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.

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 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.

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.