Poem Quotes
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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
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The poem, a harmonious flow of nuances, demands a musical rhythm, Vers libre.
F.S. Flint
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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.
Callimachus
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The Gita is not an aphoristic work, it is a great religious poem.
Mahatma Gandhi
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She was not a poet. She was a poem.
Deborah Levy
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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.
Robert Frost
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
Allen Tate
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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.
Sarah Kay
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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
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I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient.
Edgar Allan Poe
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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
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Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.
Rumi
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The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.
Allen Grossman
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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.
Edgar Allan Poe
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A poem is about something the way a cat is about the house.
Allen Grossman
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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.
Adelia Prado
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It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.
Erica Jong
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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.
Hart Crane
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A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.
Dean Young
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I feel most at home when I am writing a poem—because in that instant, I am everywhere.
Nathalie Handal
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A fine poem combines the elements of meaning, music, and a form like a living frame that holds it together.
Arnold Adoff
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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.
Sigmund Freud
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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.
Ada Limon
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I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.
Joyce Kilmer