Poem Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

Edgar Allan Poe

Good acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood.

Albert Einstein

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.

William Shakespeare

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.

Henry David Thoreau

a poem is a naked person... some people say that I am a poet

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."

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.

A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.

Edgar Allan Poe

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.

Henry David Thoreau

A poem... begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.

Edgar Allan Poe

I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.

It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.

Michel de Montaigne

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.

Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. 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. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder