Poems Quotes

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind's feelings, you'll survive.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

Well, "The Wellspring" was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Well, it's a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. 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.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you're required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems.

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.

I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.