Poem Quotes
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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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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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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.)
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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.
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Indeed, what says more: the few lines of a tightly written poem or a volume of analytical comments on it? The communicative ability of artifacts depends on how the work of negotiating meaning is distributed between reification and participation.
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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.
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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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Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.
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A fine poem combines the elements of meaning, music, and a form like a living frame that holds it together.
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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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The Gita is not an aphoristic work, it is a great religious poem.
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She was not a poet. She was a poem.
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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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A poem is about something the way a cat is about the house.
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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.
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Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.
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The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.
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It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.
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A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.
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There's so much rage in the world now and I'm finding poems to be the place where I want to stay. I rage and rage and then write a poem and return to breathing.
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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.
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I probably write a poem every 50 years.
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I have no desire to dress up my poetry and make it fancy. I want the poem to be as true as humanly possible to the feeling that inspired it. That's my only concern. Everything else seems wrong.
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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.
