Poem Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

And for the first time in my life I understand the end of that poem. And I never wanted to. You have to believe me.

Stephen Chbosky

The meanings of poetry take their growth through the interaction of the images and the music of the poem. The music is not the rhythm, which is a representation of life, alone. The music involves the interplay of the sounds of words, the length of the sequences, the keeping and breaking of rhythms, and the repetition and variation of syllables unrhymed and rhymed. It also involves the play of ideas and images.

Muriel Rukeyser

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.

The poem is important, but
not more than the people
whose survival it serves...

Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.

The truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.

Muriel Rukeyser

Show me your little poem
and I'll tell you why it wasn't written
any earlier or later than it was. Oh no, you've got me wrong.
Keep your funny piece of paper
with its scribbles.
All I need for my ends
is your layer of dirt
and the long gone
smell of burning.

Wisława Szymborska

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

When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation.... Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.

Poem by Howard A. Walter (Character) I would be true, for there are those who trust me; I would be pure, for there are those who care; I would be strong, for there are those who suffer; I would be brave, for there is much to dare. I would be friend of all— the foe, the friendless; I would be giving, and forget the gift; I would be humble, for I know my weakness; I would look up, and laugh, and love, and lift.

John C. Maxwell

Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.

Elfriede Jelinek

'There is no such thing as a cheerful poem [...] Happiness writes in water, not ink.'

Perhaps the author cited is one of those, who, shunning the practice of the world, have taught the world to shun return! whose poetry is too finely spun, whose philosophy is too and mystified for popular demand: perhaps we have experienced feeling which Mr. Wordsworth alludes to, in a poem worthy of simplicity and loneliness of the sentiment—"Often have I sighed to measure By myself a lonely pleasure; Sighed to think I read a book Only read perhaps by me!"

Samuel Laman Blanchard

One thing has led to the next in my life, but like lines of a poem. I suppose I've thrown in my lot with love, and don't know any other way to go on breathing.

The life of Lord Krishna has been misunderstood by many Western commentators. Scriptural allegory is baffling to literal minds. A hilarious blunder by a translator will illustrate this point. The story concerns an inspired medieval saint, the cobbler Ravidas, who sang in the simple terms of his own trade of the spiritual glory hidden in all mankind: Under the vast vault of blue lives the divinity clothed in hide. One turns aside to hide a smile on hearing the pedestrian interpretation given to Ravidas' poem by a Western writer:
"He afterwards built a hut, set up in it an idol which he made from a hide, and applied himself to its worship."

Paramahansa Yogananda

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

Wallace Stevens

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

It is what man does not know of God Composes the visible poem of the world.

Richard Eberhart

It's a craft, an art form. "And for me, at least, to do it well is very hard work. The whole point is, you break your behind to make it look simple. Everyone knows that a dancer works for 15 years to jump up and down like a gazelle once on a stage. For me, to make a poem seem that way too, I have to sweat blood.

Writing a poem is like a short love affair, writing a short story like a long love affair, writing a novel like a marriage.