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It goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire novel.
James Wright
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A poem is an instant of lucidity in which
the entire organism participates.
Charles Simić
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The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful.
Ted Kooser
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The music of the spheres that are swayed and held in bondage by our own sun, is echoed by that of ten million moving suns, singing their solemn chant - the grandest of epics - the Poem of the Universe, as they wing their flight through infinite space.
Mary Proctor
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The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.
William Saroyan
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The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.
George Saintsbury
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I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.
Denise Levertov
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And why should any man who writes, even if he writes things immortal, nurse anger at the world's neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? Your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it?
George Gissing
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The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.
William Carlos Williams
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
Walter Benjamin
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Writing that gets rewritten as the earth moves. If you look at the sky that way, it's this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.
Maria Dahvana Headley
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How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?
John Steinbeck
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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
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I'll
vacuum up my stale hair, I'll
pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up....
Anne Sexton
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I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
Anne Michaels
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At Delphi I prayed
to Apollo
that he maintain in me
the flame of the poem
and I drank of the brackish
spring there....
Denise Levertov
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The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
Wallace Stevens
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Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.
Marianne Boruch
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A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.
J. D. McClatchy
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Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it's being turned into a thousand songs.
Don Miller
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When Cynthia smiles, said young Bingo, the skies are blue; the world takes on a roseate hue; birds in the garden trill and sing, and Joy is king of everything, when Cynthia smiles. He coughed, changing gears. When Cynthia frowns - What the devil are you talking about?I'm reading you my poem. The one I wrote to Cynthia last night. I'll go on, shall I?No!No?No. I haven't had my tea.
P. G. Wodehouse
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What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
T. S. Eliot
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Presented rightly to the mind, the discoveries and generalizations of modern science constitute a poem more sublime than has ever yet addressed the human imagination.
John Tyndall
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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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