Poems Quotes

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

I like poems that are little games.

Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

I like poems that are complex.

The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.

I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.