Poems Quotes

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue.

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.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.