Poem Quotes
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I’d like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over.
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If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
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Schoolchildren don’t normally learn this poem about Columbus’s second voyage to Hispaniola Haiti and the Dominican Republic today: “In fourteen hundred and ninety-five, sixteen hundred people he kidnapped alive.
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You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.
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There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is the most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.
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As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore. Or if I would delight my private hours With music or with poem, where so soon As in our native language can I find That solace?
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A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.
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Don’t you think every face tells its own story? Like a book? More like a poem. If you study it long enough, you’ll soon find its meaning.
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A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.
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If you agree with me that a poem can be as bountiful as a rich Victorian narrative, and as wise... then you'll want to join me here in the Wow, I Like No Need of Sympathy Club. Your membership fee is the same as your membership privileges: this book.
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A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.
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The average political poem - especially the kind that wears this label all too proudly - is both dull and full of brow-beating triteness.
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And, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.
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Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.
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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.
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I use poetry to help me work through what I don’t understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I’ve been.
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It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.
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He was a reflection of what was going on. The poem 'Howl' was a howl against the hypocrisy and silence of the generations of the 1950s -- of the people who failed to perform their function as real elders.
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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.
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In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
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How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
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Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
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Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it's being turned into a thousand songs.
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All of the Cyclades are numinous islands, but Delos lies like a poem in the sea. She washed and cradled the archpoet Apollo and first took him for god.
