Poem Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Now I know surely and forever,
However much I have blotted our
Waking love, its memory is still
there. And I know the web, the net,
The blind and crippled bird. For then, for
One brief instant it was not blind, nor
Trapped, not crippled. For one heart beat the
Heart was free and moved itself. O love,
I who am lost and damned with words,
Whose words are a business and an art,
I have no words. These words, this poem, this
Is all confusion and ignorance.
But I know that coached by your sweet heart,
My heart beat one free beat and sent
Through all my flesh the blood of truth.

Kenneth Rexroth

If a man finishes a poem,
he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion and be kissed by white paper.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

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.

Randall Jarrell

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope. The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.

Maureen Johnson

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

I never have restricted myself into a frame of a particular technique. My techniques are determined simultaneously along with the subjects of my works. It is similar to the works of a poet, the form of a poem is determined at the same time as its content.

Every poem is a momentary defeat of pessimism.

Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem.

Howard S. Becker

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct—it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.

The only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your
mouth
and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.

Wallace Stevens

Everything sings
in snowy stillness
in marble wonder,
in formal myth,
believed because
impossible,
believed as only
a poem can be,
the anti-fact
of a holy spore
spreading the Word
unsaid before.

The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered.

Lincoln Steffens

Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist. Pink dragonflies fall from the air and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks. The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter. Like the smile of a child separated from his mother's milk for the very first time. —from poem Blood and Blossoms

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

One can translate an editorial but not a poem. For one can go across the border naked but not without one's skin; for, unlike clothes, one cannot get a new skin.

Grant that I may be successful in molding one of my pupil's into a perfect poem, and let me leave within her deepest-felt melody that she may sing for you when my lips shall sing no more.

Gabriela Mistral

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.

A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.

Samuel R. Delany

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.