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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 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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Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
Henry David Thoreau
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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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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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'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 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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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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The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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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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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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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There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified — more supremely noble than this very poem — this poem per se — this poem which is a poem and nothing more — this poem written solely for the poem's sake.
Edgar Allan Poe
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The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.
Henry David Thoreau
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Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.
Henry David Thoreau
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Listen to presences inside poems,
Let them take you where they will.
Follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises.
Rumi
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I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Pablo Neruda
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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.
Robert Frost
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An unromantic poem I mean to make
Of one who only lives for duty's sake.
Henrik Ibsen
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The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears to hear it.
Henry David Thoreau
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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
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A drowsy frowzy poem, called the 'Excursion',
Writ in a manner which is my aversion.
Lord Byron
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My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.
Groucho Marx
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The only gift is a portion of thyself... the poet brings his poem; the shepherd his lamb....
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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