Poem Quotes

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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

Yes, everything that is truly seen must become a poem.

Rainer Maria Rilke

An unromantic poem I mean to make
Of one who only lives for duty's sake.

I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.

I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length.

Edgar Allan Poe

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.

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

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.

Henry David Thoreau

The Gita is not an aphoristic work, it is a great religious poem.

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.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I am the man this poem's about,
I'll be champ of the world, there isn't a doubt.
Here I predict Mr. Liston's dismemberment,
I'll hit him so hard; he'll wonder where October and November went.
When I say two, there's never a third,
Standin against me is completely absurd.
When Cassius says a mouse can outrun a horse,
Don't ask how; put your money where your mouse is!
I AM THE GREATEST!

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful.

Do you know,
Considering the market, there are more
Poems produced than any other thing?
No wonder poets sometimes have to seem
So much more businesslike than businessmen.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

'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.

For it is not meters, but a metermaking argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

G. K. Chesterton

This is how it always is when I finish a poem. A great silence overcomes me and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.

A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.

Henry David Thoreau