Poem Quotes - page 2

I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. (Joyce Kilmer)
Your very flesh shall be a great poem... View quote
Walt Whitman
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. View quote
Mark Strand
He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
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. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.... Read it a hundred times it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went. View quote
Robert Frost
It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal woundthat he will never get over it. View quote
Robert Frost
A poem begins with a lump in the throat. View quote
Robert Frost
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child. View quote
Carl Sandburg
I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex. View quote
Thom Gunn
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be. (John Ashbery)
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests sometimes that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words. View quote
Northrop Frye
My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses. View quote
Wisława Szymborska
The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius. View quote
George Steiner
A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows of natural objects, classified with name and form. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. View quote
Charles Simic
I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds. View quote
Michael Faraday
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented. View quote
Mark Strand
It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape. View quote
Mark Strand
From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose. (Mark Strand)
A poem should improve on the blank page. View quote
Nicanor Parra
To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing. View quote
Sam Shepard
I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem. View quote
Karen Joy Fowler
Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree. View quote
Howard Nemerov