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There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
John Updike
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One quality music, alone among the arts, possesses — a warm, a satisfying friendliness. All the other arts are lonely. We paint alone — my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music — ensemble music, not soloism — we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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A poem published in one of the very best literary magazines in the country might net you a check for enough money to buy half a sack of groceries.
Ted Kooser
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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.
Thomas Carlyle
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[He] had invented a pinball machine. When we saw it, we said, George! This is not a pinball machine alone. This is the poem of a pinball machine, the essence made delicately concrete, and so forth.
Grace Paley
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Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there — which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.
Dana Gioia
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A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.
Charles Simić
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What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
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One day I found in my hands the manuscript of a poem in my father's handwriting. He had died when I was only fifteen. We had been in love with each other ever since I could remember, but he had died while our minds were still separated by my immaturity.
Katharine Butler Hathaway
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The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.
Mary Oliver
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All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Billy Collins
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Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
Rollo May
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The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.
George Steiner
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A poem is free, and it shows its freedom by establishing its own principles.
Robert Pinsky
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A poem needs nervous tension, like an arrow needs a bowstring.
A. B. Jackson
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I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.
Jeanette Winterson
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You've got it made. How the words sing a swift jazz poem of success, hi-fi, the best chicks (or guys), your name in lights, pot to burn, jets to L.A. and London, bread in the bank, baby, a fortress built around your ego like a magic suit of armor!
Seymour Krim
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Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true "Poem on His Birthday
Dylan Thomas
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Satire among the Romans, but not among the Greeks, was a bitter invective poem.
John Dryden
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
Allen Tate
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Fair are the flowers and the children, but their subtle suggestion is fairer;
Rarer is the roseburst of dawn, but the secret that clasps it rarer;
Sweet the exultance of song, but the strain that precedes it is sweeter
And never was poem yet writ, but the meaning outmastered the meter.
Richard Realf
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Lady Bab. Yes, my dear, a poem upon sol ammoniac - in which, under the name of the Loves of Ammonia, I have personified this interesting alkali, and described very tenderly all the various experiments that have been tried on her. Miss S. This is what has been called 'enlisting Poetry under the banners of Science,'
Thomas Moore
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I don't think I have written a poem when I was completely sober. But I have written a few good ones or a few bad ones under the hammer of a black hangover when I didn't know whether another drink or a blade would be the best thing.
Charles Bukowski
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Each story, novel, poem and play presents a vision of the world that illuminates the dark cave of life we stumble through. We can see better where we're going, what sudden drop to avoid, where the cool water is running.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
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Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody?
I serve the poem, no one.
Alice Notley
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Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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