Poem Quotes

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
Jim Harrison

Book, Nation, Magazine

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

Magic, Sing, Carries

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.
Robert Penn Warren

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.
Harold Bloom

Strength, Call, Page

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!
Wislawa Szymborska

Love, Work, Single

Twitter was like a poem. It was rich, real and spontaneous. It really fit my style. In a year and a half, I tweeted 60,000 tweets, over 100,000 words. I spent a minimum eight hours a day on it, sometimes 24 hours.
Ai Weiwei

Real, Words, Rich

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

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
Jose Bergamin

Born, Despair, Novel

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.
John Barton

Challenge, Reading, Draw

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
John Barton

Poetry, Makes, Exciting

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
John Barton

Long, Write, Level

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
A. R. Ammons

Past, Reason, Tell

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.
Marilyn Hacker

Help, Whether, Develop

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

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.
Andrew Motion

Free, Big, Write

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.
Andrew Motion

Free, Big, Write

When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.
Andrew Motion

True, Saying, Philosophy

Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.
Carly Simon

Music, Put, Sometimes

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
Marguerite Young

Old, Write, Loss

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
A. R. Ammons

Bad, May, Judgement

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

Laws, Becoming, Poems

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.
A. R. Ammons

Time, May, Chance

It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.
Brian Ferneyhough

True, Write, Piece

I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.
Carol Ann Duffy

Whether, Fine, Works

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.
Carol Ann Duffy

Write, Asked, Pleased

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.
Carol Ann Duffy

Writing, Before, Start

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.
Carol Ann Duffy

Deep, Play, Young

When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves - I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.
Alicia Silverstone

Life, School, Old

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.
Franz Grillparzer

Freedom, Within, Seems

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard

Service, City, Rome

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