Poem Quotes

I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.

The first time I got onstage was when I was about 5 years old. It was at a church social, and I had a poem to recite.

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

If you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that's a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don't like the melodies, and vice versa.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.

Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.

Well, it's a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

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.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.

I think you can have the greatest lyrics in the world and if it doesn't have the best tune in the world it will suck. I mean if the music wasn't important it would just be a poem.