Poem Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

The "medium is the message" is one of the world's silliest remarks. The message is the message, and it doesn't matter whether you send it by e-mail, a note in a bottle or on a picture postcard. The book, or the poem, or the play is what counts and it doesn't matter if it's written with a pen on a long sheet of ruled paper, as I am writing now, or on the most highly developed word processor. No machine can help with the rhythms of your prose, even if it can spell better than you can.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.

The glove has been thrown to the ground,
The last choice of weapons made.
A book for one thought.
A poem for one line.
A line for one word.

Eugene McCarthy

The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention – incites a pleasurable compulsion to 'follow' – is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good.

The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good — at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.

It's complicated, being an American,
Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time.
Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem.

A poem might begin for me from a rhythmical phrase without words but with an an emotional / tonal pitch or colour which will announce itself.Other times I' ll just become obsessed by something..hoping that eventually it will speak to me in English.

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

Gwendolyn Brooks

The beginning of a poem is always a moment of tiny revelation, a new way of seeing something, which almost simultaneously attracts language to it.

Carol Ann Duffy

An example: if I compose a picture using as objects a scrap of bark, a scrap of butterfly wing and a purely imaginary form, you probably won't recognise the bark, or the butterfly wing, and you'll say: 'What does this stand for? It is an abstract picture. No it's a representational picture'.... There is no such thing as 'abstract', or 'concrete' either. There is a good picture and a bad picture. There is the picture that moves you and the picture that leaves you cold.... A picture has a value in itself, like a musical score, like a poem.

When writing a poem, I feel like I'm translating. And when I'm translating, I feel like I'm writing.

Not allowing what happened in the past to determine your future starts in your mind. What you think and feel is key. Are you able to say and believe that you are creating your own future or, to paraphrase the William Ernest Henley poem 'Invictus', that you are the master of your fate?

Nigel Cumberland

It is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.

What distinguishes a mathematical model from, say, a poem, a song, a portrait or any other kind of "model," is that the mathematical model is an image or picture of reality painted with logical symbols instead of with words, sounds or watercolors.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

Margaret Atwood

Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.

The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.

Christopher Morley

The life, no matter how traumatic, never explains the work, if the work is any good. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Doris Lessing, and Saul Bellow variously believed in faeries, funny money, flying saucers, and orgone energy accumulation, but so have millions of other people who never got around to writing even a mediocre poem or novel.

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.

Randall Jarrell

Around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned.

Robert A. Heinlein

One way poetry connects is across time.... Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

Jane Hirshfield

The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian philosopher and historian — the humble listener — there has been a Divine melody running through the song which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come.

James A. Garfield