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

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Octavio Paz

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

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.
Marilyn Hacker

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
Mark Strand

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

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Paul Engle

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
Charles Simic

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
Thomas B. Macaulay

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
Allen Tate

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
Julie Taymor

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.
Paul Muldoon

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
Allen Tate

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

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!
Kenneth Koch

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

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
Stephen Spender

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.
Basil Bunting

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

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
Lascelles Abercrombie