Poem Quotes
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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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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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A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.
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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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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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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.
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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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The monsoon came, six months of infinite rain. The towns I once knew were wiped clean, and everyone said it was God revising his poem.
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Not that a poem can "hurt" someone the same way a physical blow can or even a mean remark can...I just felt unsure that my tone would be taken the right way and/or unsure of my own writing, that I couldn't maintain the tone I wanted.
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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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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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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.
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I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
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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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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.
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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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She's kind of a walking poem, she's this perfect beauty...but at the same time very deep, very smart.
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When clever people ask me where I get a poem, I despair.
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The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.
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The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn't get written because someone knocked on the door.
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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.
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I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
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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.
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
