Poem Quotes
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End rhymes are not enough. Every word-sound in a poem should find an echo in another, neighbouring word's sound to achieve what Ezra Pound called melopoeia. (This is something like what the Welsh call Cynghanned.)
Anne Stevens -
When clever people ask me where I get a poem, I despair.
Robert Frost
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If I were to agree to write the music for your beautiful poem, it would tie your poem up for some years as I have agreements and obligations which I must respect.
Jules Massenet -
Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.
Edgar Allan Poe -
I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.
Sigmund Freud -
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.
Walt Whitman -
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.
Robert Frost -
The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.
Kathleen Rooney
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She's kind of a walking poem, she's this perfect beauty...but at the same time very deep, very smart.
Johnny Depp -
Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.
Rumi -
The immediate success of the war poem anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years.
Edmund Gosse -
I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
Edgar Allan Poe -
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.
Arthur Rimbaud -
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
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The poem, a harmonious flow of nuances, demands a musical rhythm, Vers libre.
F.S. Flint -
You're looking for something, I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'm looking. Writing is a lot about that. When you write a poem. When you write a novel.
Alejandro Zambra -
A poem employs both the sound and the sense of language, it treats words not just as signifiers but as a plastic medium of artistic expression.
Campbell McGrath -
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
Robert Frost -
Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.
Burton Rascoe -
Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it's being turned into a thousand songs.
Donald Miller
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I feel most at home when I am writing a poem—because in that instant, I am everywhere.
Nathalie Handal -
My dance is a sacred poem in which each movement is a word and whose every word is underlined by music. The temple in which I dance can be vague or faithfully reproduced, for I am the temple.
Mata Hari -
The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.
Alan Green -
The mind wraps itself around a poem. It is almost sensual, particularly if you work on a computer. You can turn the poem round and about and upside down, dancing with it a kind of bolero of two snakes twisting and coiling, until the poem has found its right and proper shape.
Marge Piercy