Poems Quotes

If I were to die thinking that I'd written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn't lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us - well, I would settle for a handful.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue.

I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume.

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.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

People can put their best poems straight onto the web.

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

I like poems that are complex.

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.