Poem Quotes - page 22

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. (Nicholas Mosley)
You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem. View quote
Nicholson Baker
The way to praise a poet is to write a poem. View quote
Paul Engle
The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise. View quote
Robert Fitzgerald
When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice. View quote
Robert Frank
I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale. View quote
Robert Morgan
Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime. View quote
Raymond Aubrac
I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since. View quote
Sharon Creech
I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says 'The Road Not Taken,' which is a poem by Robert Frost. View quote
Steven R. McQueen
A song is a poem set to music. View quote
Tom T. Hall
If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.' (Taylor Mali)
I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems. View quote
Yusef Komunyakaa
I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem. View quote
Yusef Komunyakaa
We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. View quote
Rachel Carson
We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road-the one "less traveled by"-offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. The choice, after all, is ours to make. View quote
Rachel Carson
When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination for new meanings. View quote
Rollo May
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem. View quote
Rollo May
Both the aphorism and the poem channel man's wild impulse to escape the systems another part of him has so carefully constructed. View quote
Clifton Fadiman
A poem, a genuine one, does not need to fear the world; it stands up to it, even when a bell rings and an unexpected guest arrives to tell us, while the same coffee is still in our cups, of his fourteen years in captivity... View quote
Max Frisch
The strange and wonderful Book of Job treats of the same subject as we are discussing; its contents are a fiction, conceived for the purpose of explaining the different opinions which people hold on Divine Providence. ...This fiction, however, is in so far different from other fictions that it includes profound ideas and great mysteries, removes great doubts, and reveals the most important truths. I will discuss it as fully as possible; and I will also tell you the words of our Sages that suggested to me the explanation of this great poem. View quote
Maimonides
Some poets are more deeply involved than others in the raw experience which lies behind the poem and for them the act of composition is an act of self exploration with the definite goal of enlightenment rather than the ideally depersonalized construction of a beautiful and autonomous object. (Vernon Scannell)
The proper act of reading of a poem was not an act of passive submission but one of collaboration with its author. View quote
Vernon Scannell
A word or a phrase or a line is not a poem. A poem is the exploration and shaping of an experience. A real poem demands intelligence, imagination, passion, understanding, experience and not least a knowledge of the craft. View quote
Vernon Scannell
They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. --From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962. View quote
Sylvia Plath
Eternity bores me, I never wanted it. From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962. View quote
Sylvia Plath