Poem Quotes - page 27

Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument. (John Berger)
"About the Seduction of an Angel" [Über die Verführung von Engeln]; the poem actually stems from Brecht's own pen, but Brecht signed it with the name of his contemporary, fellow German author (in exile) Thomas Mann. View quote
Bertolt Brecht
A poem is a naked person. View quote
Bob Dylan
I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree. View quote
William Butler Yeats
If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility. View quote
William Butler Yeats
The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary. View quote
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. View quote
Caitlín R. Kiernan
I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it. View quote
Wisława Szymborska
In his last poem he offered nothing as a legacy. He but hoped that after his death nature would remain beautiful. That could be his bequest. View quote
Yasunari Kawabata
I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem. View quote
Rita Dove
My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war. (James Fenton)
Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which the poem itself has to respond to. View quote
James Fenton
'Love' is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like 'move.' The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which the poet addresses his adored both as 'love' and as 'guv' - a perfectly decent solution once, but only once, in a while. View quote
James Fenton
I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem. View quote
James Fenton
A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room. View quote
James Fenton
Tennyson follows his feelings in creating each line. He follows the music in his head. If you had asked him, at the end of the day, to describe the prosody of the poem to you, he would no doubt have had to think for a moment before he could answer you, not because he was ignorant of the terms, but because he had been writing a poem, not a metrical exercise. At every point, he was exerting his free will. And the outcome of that exertion was the form. View quote
James Fenton
The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital. View quote
George Steiner
A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically. View quote
Diane Ackerman
Consciousness, the great poem of matter, seems so unlikely, so impossible, and yet here we are with our loneliness and our giant dreams. View quote
Diane Ackerman
Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries. View quote
Lawrence M. Krauss
‘... the menu's a delirious poem/on which the names of Moghlai and Punjabi and Parsi/. (Amit Chaudhuri)
Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the "Mona Lisa" painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer. View quote
Alfred Whitney Griswold
A certain ambiguity of rhythm is one of the beauties of a poem. View quote
Anne Ridler
Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem. View quote
Kahlil Gibran
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson