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Of course there is matter for remark in poems. Nobody denies that. But it must be solemnly laid on everybody in this world to make his own observations and remarks. That's what we mean by thinking, and that's about all we mean. A teacher says to a pupil "Watch me notice a few things in the next few months: let's see you notice a few things too."
Robert Frost
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I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
Robert Frost
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Good acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood.
Albert Einstein
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Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
Bob Dylan
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A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
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A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.
Robert Frost
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Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
Robert Frost
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May Moorland weavers boast Pindaric skill, And tailors' lays be longer than their bill! While punctual beaux reward the grateful notes, And pay for poems--when they pay for coats.
Lord Byron
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I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.
Lewis Carroll
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A dictionary…is full of suggestions—the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing is wanting but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.
C. S. Lewis
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He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.
Virginia Woolf
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What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,--for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.
Henry David Thoreau
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My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.
Henry David Thoreau
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The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life — not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
Robert Frost
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It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.
Henry David Thoreau
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'Twas Age imposed on poems
Their gather-roses burden
To warn against the danger
That overtaken lovers
From being overflooded
With happiness should have it
And yet not know they have it.
Robert Frost
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It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.
Robert Frost
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Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.
Rabindranath Tagore
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I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.
Henry David Thoreau
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It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.
G. K. Chesterton
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It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.
Robert Frost
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But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
C. S. Lewis
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The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit.
Plato
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