Poem Quotes - page 3

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties. (Anne Stevenson)
When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut! View quote
Kenneth Koch
The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word. View quote
Mata Hari
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable. View quote
Robert Morgan
You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. View quote
Theodore Roethke
My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it. View quote
Henry David Thoreau
I want to make a poem of my life. View quote
Yukio Mishima
He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, - but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite. View quote
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book, or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation. View quote
Marguerite Duras
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. (Paul Celan)
During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance ... has seeped down into the lowest publications. ... Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature's spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests. View quote
Simone Weil
The one great poem of New England is her Sunday. View quote
Henry Ward Beecher
I would not be like those Authors, who forgive themselves some particular lines for the sake of a whole Poem, and vice versa a whole Poem for the sake of some particular lines. I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts. View quote
Alexander Pope
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. View quote
Edgar Allan Poe
A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. View quote
Edgar Allan Poe
A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words. View quote
Robert Frost
You've often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more. View quote
Robert Frost
There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. View quote
William Carlos Williams
My first poem was a bolt from the blue ... it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy. (William Carlos Williams)
The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
I don't distinguish between magic and art. When I got into magic, I realised I had been doing it all along, ever since I wrote my first pathetic story or poem when I was twelve or whatever. This has all been my magic, my way of dealing with it. View quote
Alan Moore
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way. View quote
Paul Muldoon
If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride. View quote
Paul Muldoon