Poem Quotes

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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.

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

When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty.

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

I've learned to rely on the strength I inherited from all those who came before me-the grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and brothers who were tested with unimaginable hardships and still survived. 'I go forth alone, and stand as ten thousand,' Maya Angelou proclaimed in her poem 'Our Grandmothers.' When I move through the world, I bring all my history with me-all the people who paved the way for me are part of who I am.

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

The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears to hear it.

Henry David Thoreau

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing... is discovering.

I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.

A true poem is distinguished not so much by a felicitous expression, or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it. Most have beauty of outline merely, and are striking as the form and bearing of a stranger; but true verses come toward us indistinctly, as the very breath of all friendliness, and envelop us in their spirit and fragrance.

Henry David Thoreau

Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.

Critics and reviewers can be loosely divided into two camps: Those who never let you forget that they are judge, jury, and if need be, executioner; and those who humble themselves before a poem or novel, waiting for it to reveal its secrets to them.

No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.... Poetry.. remains one person talking to another.... no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.

That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn't matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something—a sculptor he would have been, no doubt—who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course.

P. G. Wodehouse

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

Australians are like most who won't read this poem
or any, since literature turned on them
and bodiless jargons without reverie
scorn their loves as illusion and biology,
compared with bloody History, the opposite of home.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

Jonathan Culler

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

Part of making a poem is a process of day- dreaming.

Well: the day is a poem but too much Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens, Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.

Robinson Jeffers

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.