Poem Quotes

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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

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

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

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

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

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts. Woman the poem, man the poet; woman the heart, man the head; such divisions are only important when they are never to be transcended. If nature is never bound down, nor the voice of inspiration stifled, that is enough.

Margaret Fuller

Why don't you leave? the woman in the poem asked herself. We need to stop asking that question and begin to understand why she is staying. From understanding comes the ability to reach, to touch and to change. And if we help even just one woman to take that courageous first step out of violence, we have achieved a lot.

Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark

A glance at the score shows how sadly the pedagogue might go astray in judgment of the work, without a hearing of it, and furthermore, the imagination of the hearer must be in sympathy with the imagination of the composer, if he would know full enjoyment: for this symphonic poem provokes swooning thoughts, such as come to the partakers of leaves and flowers of hemp; there are the stupefying perfumes of charred frankincense and grated sandal-root.

Walter Raymond Spalding

Now no one will listen to songs.
The prophesied days have begun.
Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its
wonder,
Don't break my heart, don't ring out.

A poem is a witness to man's knowledge of evil as well as good. It is not the duty of a witness to pass moral judgement on the evidence he has to give, but to give it clearly and accurately; the only crime of which a witness can be guilty is perjury.

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read — in such a moment, anything can happen.

Jane Hirshfield

I hope that with our music we can inspire other people to be creative and to use their imagination, because it is something that is so lacking nowadays. You have virtual reality, MTV, video games and VCR's. Nobody really wants to think about things or create things. You have programs on a computer which will write a poem for you.

Now I know surely and forever,
However much I have blotted our
Waking love, its memory is still
there. And I know the web, the net,
The blind and crippled bird. For then, for
One brief instant it was not blind, nor
Trapped, not crippled. For one heart beat the
Heart was free and moved itself. O love,
I who am lost and damned with words,
Whose words are a business and an art,
I have no words. These words, this poem, this
Is all confusion and ignorance.
But I know that coached by your sweet heart,
My heart beat one free beat and sent
Through all my flesh the blood of truth.

Kenneth Rexroth

If a man finishes a poem,
he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion and be kissed by white paper.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.

Randall Jarrell

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope. The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.

Maureen Johnson

Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist. Pink dragonflies fall from the air and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks. The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter. Like the smile of a child separated from his mother's milk for the very first time. —from poem Blood and Blossoms

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.

Wallace Stevens

Everything sings
in snowy stillness
in marble wonder,
in formal myth,
believed because
impossible,
believed as only
a poem can be,
the anti-fact
of a holy spore
spreading the Word
unsaid before.

The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered.

Lincoln Steffens

The only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your
mouth
and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are