Poem Quotes

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He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.

It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours.

I think what holds a poem like this together for me, if it's held together, is largely meter; this one is in iambic pentameter and iambic pentameter whatever else it is, can be a very good glue. It is a very good way to hold things together. It's like 4:4 you know.

The holiest, cruellest pains I feel,
Die stillborn, because old men squeal
For something new: "Write something new:
We've read this poem — that one too,
And twelve more like 'em yesterday"?

Satire among the Romans, but not among the Greeks, was a bitter invective poem.

To name an object is to take away three-fourths of the pleasure given by a poem. This pleasure consists in guessing little by little: to suggest it, that is the ideal.

Stéphane Mallarmé

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another. You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse, A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.

Wallace Stevens

Both the aphorism and the poem channel man's wild impulse to escape the systems another part of him has so carefully constructed.

Clifton Fadiman

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,'

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.

William Butler Yeats

There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

William Carlos Williams

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

I write from notebooks. I'm never without them. See, I can lose things in there, and know it doesn't matter, because sooner or later you're going to need something. Now you're in the rich hour where you've got something useless, but you feel you could use, so you write it down. For one long poem I can exhaust three years of notebooks.

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.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this.

Art is its own excuse, and it's either Art or it's something else. It's either a poem or a piece of cheese.

Charles Bukowski

Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on.

Lidia Yuknavitch

The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.

Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody?
I serve the poem, no one.

I woodah write a poem
soh dyam deep
dat it bittah-sweet
like a precious
mernari
whe mek yu weep
whe mek yu feel incomplete

Linton Kwesi Johnson

For you are abstract,
making no mistake,
slurring no word
in the rhythm you make,
the poem,
writ in the air.

The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time. There's a whole kind of inside thing bursting out, and I'm always dying to hear it. I do hear it in my head, but I never read it out loud to myself until I'm in front of people.

New York was possessed of that old European idea of respecting or even revering the writer or the artist. I mean, if you were black in those days, you could get by with one poem or one novel. If I had remained in New York, I would've been killed by an overdose of affection.

In prose you make the paragraph. Every paragraph is a poem.