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

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

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

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
Allen Tate

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.
Marilyn Hacker

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

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
John Ashbery

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.
Richard Rosen

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.
Charles Olson

The point of an experiment is not to arrive at a predetermined end point, to prove or disprove anything, but to deliver a poem that reveals much about the process taken.
John Barton

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

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

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.
Harold Bloom

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
Walt Whitman

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.
William Kingdon Clifford

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
Gore Vidal

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
John Updike

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
Sharon Olds

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