Poem Quotes - page 26

I have gone over three different translations of the poem, and am struck by how much a translation can alter our interpretation. I am reminded that most holy scriptures come to us in translation, resulting in a diversity of views. (Loreena McKennitt)
I was going to write a poem, I was stifling, fed up with old things. View quote
Ataol Behramoğlu
Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own. View quote
Basil Bunting
You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
The life of Lord Krishna has been misunderstood by many Western commentators. Scriptural allegory is baffling to literal minds. A hilarious blunder by a translator will illustrate this point. The story concerns an inspired medieval saint, the cobbler Ravidas, who sang in the simple terms of his own trade of the spiritual glory hidden in all mankind: Under the vast vault of blue Lives the divinity clothed in hide. One turns aside to hide a smile on hearing the pedestrian interpretation given to Ravidas' poem by a Western writer: "He afterwards built a hut, set up in it an idol which he made from a hide, and applied himself to its worship." View quote
Paramahansa Yogananda
But to poetry - You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
If, in the middle of World War II, a general could be writing a poem, then maybe I was not so irrelevant after all. Maybe the general was doing more for victory by writing a poem than he would be by commanding an army. At least, he might be doing less harm. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
If you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that's a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don't like the melodies, and vice versa. View quote
Harry Connick
With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with. View quote
Terry Eagleton
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness' of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska. (Terry Eagleton)
The Book of Boz is neither a novel nor a poem nor a tale. Even less is it a drama or an essay. It is nothing except the style that inspires it and haunts it, to excess. No points of reference here. No beacon. You sail wherever the wind blows. Stories are woven, end, are reborn, with the flow, before a storm comes up to carry us further away, to the threshold of a new vision. For, that is The Book of Boz : a work outside of norms, indefinable, created by a wanderer for other wanderers. View quote
Julien Friedler
Delvig's best poem is the one he dedicated to Pushkin . A boy of sixteen, prophesying in exact detail literary immortality to a boy of fifteen, and doing it in a poem that is itself immortal-this is a combination of intuitive genius and actual destiny to which I can find no parallel in the history of world poetry. View quote
Anton Delvig
To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth...but only a problem of art is solved in poetry. View quote
Laura Riding
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. View quote
Pablo Neruda
And for the authentical truth of either person or actions, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth? View quote
George Chapman
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude. View quote
Harold Bloom
The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. View quote
James A. Garfield
The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian philosopher and historian - the humble listener - there has been a Divine melody running through the song which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come. View quote
James A. Garfield
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose. View quote
J. K. Rowling
if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem. (Natalie Clifford Barney)
In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. View quote
Northrop Frye
The Beautiful Poem" I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking about you. Pissing a few moments ago I looked down at my penis affectionately. Knowing it has been inside you twice today makes me feel beautiful. View quote
Richard Brautigan
I believe everyone has this fuckin' poem in his heart. View quote
Bill Hicks
Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer