Poem Quotes - page 8

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it. (Philip Levine)
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity. View quote
Philip Levine
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage. View quote
Paul Engle
I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza. View quote
Robert Indiana
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does. View quote
Robert Morgan
In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking. View quote
Robert Morgan
Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space. View quote
Richard Corliss
I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer. View quote
Tahar Ben Jelloun
For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit. View quote
Tracy K. Smith
In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event. View quote
Theodore Bikel
Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape. (Yusef Komunyakaa)
The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth. View quote
Rachel Carson
My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something. View quote
Groucho Marx
Listening a cultivated person of today that jokes and almost boasts about his scientific ignorance, is as sad as listening a scientist that boasts about not having read any poem. View quote
Carlo Rovelli
The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be nonbeing until the poet's struggle brings forth an answer - meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision. View quote
Rollo May
The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods. View quote
Theodore Roethke
I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem. View quote
Beck
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them. View quote
Henry David Thoreau
A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured. View quote
Henry David Thoreau
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. View quote
Derek Walcott
The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality. (Sylvia Plath)
I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song. View quote
Sylvia Plath
It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation. View quote
Sylvia Plath
Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield. View quote
Tennessee Williams
Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one. View quote
Thomas Carlyle