Poem Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

The beginning of a poem is always a moment of tiny revelation, a new way of seeing something, which almost simultaneously attracts language to it.

Carol Ann Duffy

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

Randall Jarrell

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind—or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean—except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

I recognize the gods' capricious hand
And write this poem for money, rage, and love.

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

Gwendolyn Brooks

The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.

I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems.... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

Gwendolyn Brooks

An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.

A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.

[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even— at least not systematic ; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.

Randall Jarrell

In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.

Michael Schmidt

Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.

New York was possessed of that old European idea of respecting or even revering the writer or the artist. I mean, if you were black in those days, you could get by with one poem or one novel. If I had remained in New York, I would've been killed by an overdose of affection.

Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, 'Stay, thou art so fair.

Robert F. Kennedy

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

We all live with it. That unbearable terror is what makes us such singular creatures. We hide from it, we succumb to it, mostly we defy it! We build fragile little structures to keep it out. We love, we raise families, we work, we make friends. We write poems...

Paddy Chayefsky

To make a Dadaist Poem (1920)

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

The person in the poem is a character like a character in fiction whom the poet has invented—without clothes or a family, or a place of birth, just a voice—to convey himself. Any resemblance he bears to the poet you meet on a signing line is slightly less than coincidental. Meeting the author is one of life's most reliably disappointing experiences, not because authors are such nasty people, but because you have already met them under the best possible circumstance—on the page.

There are probably very few people who have not at some time of their lives had some quality of genius. If they have not had such, it is probable that they have also been without great sorrow or great pain. They would have needed only to live sufficiently intently for a time for some quality to reveal itself. The poems of first love are a case in point, and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus.