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Every good poem, in fact, is a bridge built from the known, familiar side of life over into the unknown.
Cecil Day Lewis
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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
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The world is a great poem, and the world's
The words it is writ in, and we souls the thoughts.
Philip James Bailey
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None of you knows what creativity means. To paint a picture, to write a poem? No! To recast one's whole age, to impose upon it the stamp of one's will, to fill it with beauty, to overwhelm it, to overpower it with one's spirit.
Christian Morgenstern
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A good religious poem, today, is ambergris, and it is hard to enjoy it for thinking of all those suffering whales; but martyrs are born, not made.
Randall Jarrell
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The Republic is no less a mimetic poem than are the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Stanley Rosen
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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
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There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
John Updike
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The clouds preceded us. There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete. From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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The poem goes form the poet's gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
Wallace Stevens
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The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
Theodore Roethke
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Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter...the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing
John Milton
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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.
Anna Akhmatova
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One quality music, alone among the arts, possesses — a warm, a satisfying friendliness. All the other arts are lonely. We paint alone — my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music — ensemble music, not soloism — we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things
Rita Dove
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The distinction between a major and minor poet is the ability to write a long poem successfully.
Herbert Read
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Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus's rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.
George Steiner
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One day I found in my hands the manuscript of a poem in my father's handwriting. He had died when I was only fifteen. We had been in love with each other ever since I could remember, but he had died while our minds were still separated by my immaturity.
Katharine Butler Hathaway
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What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
W. H. Auden
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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
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A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.
Charles Simić
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Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there — which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.
Dana Gioia
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If Saint Bruce doesn't like your poem, he chops your head off.
Vivian Vande Velde
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Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
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