Poem Quotes - page 23
That a man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children who has filled his niche and accomplished his task who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Your face had become dark, and, upon the day's awakening, your ashes will disperse themselves throughout the garden.
Your ashes will fly to the sky, to make love with the stars.
Sandy, Sandy, your ashes caress the rainbow flowers that tickle the blue of the sky.
[short poem of Miro, on the death of his good old art-paw, the inventor of the 'mobile', Sandy Calder ].
Joan Miró
What happens at the beginning of your poem has to-because it's a poem-be transformed by the end of your poem. So if the triggering moment for the beginning of your poem is a known political moment, I am fine with that, that's great. But as I'm reading, I expect it to change because that was just the trigger...
Jericho Brown
They [French critics of the Paris Salon of 1824, where his painting 'the Hay Wain' received a gold medal] are very amusing and acute - but very shallow and feeble. Thus one - after saying: "'it is but justice to admire the truth - 'the color' - and 'general vivacity' & richness -" – yet they want the objects more formed and defined &c, and say they are like the rich preludes in musick, and the full harmonious warblings of the Aeolian lyre, which means 'nothing,' and they call them orations - and harangues - and high-flown conversations affecting a careless ease - &c &v &c - Is not some of this 'blame' the highest 'praise' – what is poetry? – What is Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (the very best modern poem) but something like this?
John Constable
Surrealist methods would, moreover, demand to be heard. Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations. The pieces of paper that Picasso and Braque (in this quote Breton refers to the early collage art of the two Cubists, ed.) insert into their work have the same value as the introduction of a platitude into a literary analysis of the most rigorous sort. It is even permissible to entitle POEM what we get from the most random assemblage possible (observe, if you will, the syntax) of headlines and scraps of headlines cut out of the newspapers.
André Breton
A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.
Edgar Allan Poe
It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends 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. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood.
Robert Frost
