Poem Quotes

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.

I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.

The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Twitter was like a poem. It was rich, real and spontaneous. It really fit my style. In a year and a half, I tweeted 60,000 tweets, over 100,000 words. I spent a minimum eight hours a day on it, sometimes 24 hours.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

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.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

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

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

In one line of his poem he said good fences make good neighbors. I'd like to think that Alaska and British Columbia working together can prove that we can be pretty darned good neighbors without fences.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.