Poem Quotes

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.
Mata Hari

Dance, Word, Movement

Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?
Dorothy Fields

Music, Long, Two

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.
Joyce Kilmer

Lovely, Shall, Tree

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
James Laughlin

Good, Poetry, Mind

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.
James Laughlin

Long, Saying, Said

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

Service, City, Rome

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.
Robert Creeley

Mind, Words, Him

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
Derek Walcott

Writing, Write, Average

I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.
Wendy Cope

Someone, Writing, Two

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it's composition. If you don't understand what it's about, you're depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem.
Dexter Gordon

Yourself, Understand, Able

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.
George Saintsbury

Greatest, Story, Though

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
George Steiner

Heart, Important, Human

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.
Ron Rash

Long, Writing, Down

I think you can have the greatest lyrics in the world and if it doesn't have the best tune in the world it will suck. I mean if the music wasn't important it would just be a poem.
Julian Cope

Music, Best, Greatest

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
Maxine Hong Kingston

Life, Poetry, Begin

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.
Hart Crane

Failure, Long, Fact

The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.
Hart Crane

Future, Past, Real

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
Laura Riding

Truth, Art, Poetry

Still the question remains of what actually speaks in a poem, if not subjectivity as historically constructed.
Thomas Harrison

Question, Actually, Remains

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.
Thomas Harrison

Sense, Message, Advent

With the question of the effect of a poem, the topic of investigation shifts from that of textual autonomy to textual reception - to the issue of what we actually look for or find in reading a poem.
Thomas Harrison

Find, Question, Reading

Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.
James Merrill

Words, Find, Knowing

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
James Schuyler

However, Sentence, Prose

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem.
James Schuyler

End, Often, Though

In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.
James Schuyler

Work, Past, Person

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).
James Schuyler

Experience, Mean, Sometimes

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
Northrop Frye

Nature, Time, Science

To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative.
Nicholas Mosley

Nothing, Saying, Put

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

Takes, Line, Lines

In one line of his poem he said good fences make good neighbors. I'd like to think that Alaska and British Columbia working together can prove that we can be pretty darned good neighbors without fences.
Dan Miller

Good, Together, Pretty

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