Poems Quotes

Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind's feelings, you'll survive.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

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.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you're required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems.

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.

I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific.

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough.

There's so much to think about when you're becoming an adult, and there's so many great poems about that apprehension and excitement.

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

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 ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.

I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.