Poem Quotes
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“Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody?
I serve the poem, no one.
Alice Notley
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Give shape, artist! don't talk!
Your poem be but a breath.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
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A poem is the realization of love. . . .
Rene Char
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A "poem" is understood as something referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures.
Ben Lerner
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One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.
Stephen Dobyns
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What's interesting about songs where the writer is genuinely in love with words is that it's easy to read the lyrics like a poem.
Ann Reed
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A writer's work often reflects what he or she has been exposed to in life; experiences which are the groundwork of a poem or a story.
Eyvind Johnson
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Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at sending stuff out or feeling that something is ready to send out and I never have been. Part of the problem is that as soon as a poem is finished, it stops being all that interesting to me.
Nick Laird
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This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Walt Whitman
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But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.
Ben Lerner
