Poem Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

A poem is an instant of lucidity in which
the entire organism participates.

It goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire novel.

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

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.

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

Wallace Stevens

Among some papers on my table I see the poem again which we once found out of doors, the bit of paper escaped from the mysterious hands which wrote on it, and come to the stone seat. It ended by whispering, "Only I know the tears that brimming rise, your beauty blended with your smile to espy."
In the days of yore it had made us smile with delight. To-night there are real tears in my eyes. What is it? I dimly see that there is something more than what we have seen, than what we have said, than what we have felt today. One day, perhaps, she and I will exchange better and richer sayings; and so, in that day, all the sadness will be of some service.

The fact that Saigyo composed a poem that begins, "I shall be unhappy without loneliness," shows that he made loneliness his master.

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

If you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff you haven't even climbed. This is a lesson that can only be learned by trial and error.

As the diamond is the crystalline Revelator of the achromatic white light of Heaven, so is a perfect poem the crystalline revelation of the Divine Idea.

Thomas Holley Chivers

In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.

Michael Schmidt

The General…repeated nearly the whole of Gray's Elegy…adding, as he concluded, that he would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any ideal, neither of an angel in heaven, nor of a hero in a poem or novel, nor one that is dreamed up or imagined: rather shalt thou love a man as he is.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Childhood and magic are married in this poem inscribed in infinity, like traces on walls or cracks in venerable walls, superimposed posters lacerated by wind, rain and poetry; calligraphy and ideograph intermerge in this equation.... in this sign.

The rhythm of a poem ceases the moment the feeling loses its intensity.
The feeling (of intensity) held in a crystal cage, asn an image, sealed and immortalized for our contemplation. Beauty in a wild foray, the form we have created, now, remote from the emotion we experience.

The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.

Samuel R. Delany

There are so many ways to ruin a poem it's quite amazing good ones ever get written.

I have bathed in the Poem of the Sea, steeped in stars, and milky, devouring the green azures.

To translate a great poem demands months and years of earnest devotion, coupled with poetic inspiration. But to read the book of Nature is the province and privilege of consummate genius, submissive to unremitting discipline.

Benjamin Peirce

Don't you think every face tells its own story? Like a book? More like a poem. If you study it long enough, you'll soon find its meaning.

Such was Gods Poem, this Worlds new Essay;
So wild and rude in its first draught it lay;
Th' ungovern'd parts no Correspondence knew,
An artless war from thwarting Motions grew;
Till they to Number and fixt Rules were brought
By the eternal Minds Poetique Thought.
Water and Air he for the Tenor chose,
Earth made the Base, the Treble Flame arose,
To th' active Moon a quick brisk stroke he gave,
To Saturns string a touch more soft and grave.
The motions Strait, and Round, and Swift, and Slow,
And Short, and Long, were mixt and woven so,
Did in such artful Figures smoothly fall,
As made this decent measur'd Dance of All.

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield.

Tennessee Williams

This day relenting God
Hath placed within my hand
A wondrous thing; and God
Be praised. At His command,
Seeking His secret deeds
With tears and toiling breath,
I find thy cunning seeds,
O million-murdering Death.
I know this little thing
A myriad men will save.
O Death, where is thy sting?
Thy victory, O Grave?
Poem he wrote following the discovery that the malaria parasite was carried by the amopheline mosquito.

That I am your heart's secret fills me with song. I wish I could sing of you here in my cage. You are my heart's hidden poem. I reread you, memorize you every moment we're apart.