Poem Quotes

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.

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

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.

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.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

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.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

If I were to agree to write the music for your beautiful poem, it would tie your poem up for some years as I have agreements and obligations which I must respect.

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem.

A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist.

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.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.

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.