Poem Quotes

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer.

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.

It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem.