Poem Quotes - page 5

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics. (H. L. Mencken)
Poetry is a subset of a Cosmos, which in itself, is a poem. View quote
Vanna Bonta
The true poem rests between the words. View quote
Vanna Bonta
For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard. View quote
Rita Dove
I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day. View quote
Rita Dove
The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force. View quote
George Steiner
To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness. View quote
George Steiner
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author.. reasoning powers must be brought to reinforce imagination. View quote
Flora Thompson
You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dalí spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theater, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous! (Salvador Dalí)
The poem of the understanding is philosophy. View quote
Novalis
A poem should not mean But be. View quote
Archibald MacLeish
When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them, Then nothing will remain of the iron age And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain... View quote
Robinson Jeffers
He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem. View quote
John Milton
People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence. View quote
Dmitri Shostakovich
Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others ... And your very flesh shall be a great poem. View quote
Walt Whitman
Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad - and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry. View quote
Randall Jarrell
If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus. View quote
Randall Jarrell
I think Miss Moore was right to cut "The Steeple-Jack” - the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state - but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, "Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it's hers, isn't it?” No; it's much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David's left leg. (Randall Jarrell)
The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth. View quote
Randall Jarrell
I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got to Evangeline, kept echoing in my ears: "We're coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don't be babies and start counting the pages.” I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages. View quote
Randall Jarrell
...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it... View quote
Randall Jarrell
When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die. View quote
Randall Jarrell