Poem Quotes
-
The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
She was not a poet. She was a poem.
-
The Gita is not an aphoristic work, it is a great religious poem.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.)
-
A poem is about something the way a cat is about the house.
-
Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.
-
The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.
-
It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.
-
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.
-
A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.
-
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.
-
A fine poem combines the elements of meaning, music, and a form like a living frame that holds it together.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I feel most at home when I am writing a poem—because in that instant, I am everywhere.
-
If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.
