Poem Quotes
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An unromantic poem I mean to make, of one who only lives for duty's sake.
Henrik Ibsen
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Each poem seems to demand its own formal approach. In both drafting and revision, I'll play around with line lengths and stanza formations, eventually letting the poem settle into what I think is its own best form.
Allison Joseph
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The world is a great poem, and the world's
The words it is writ in, and we souls the thoughts.
Philip James Bailey
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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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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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Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself
and gaze back, an important trick
because the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,
shuttling between the you and I.
Ben Lerner
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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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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
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On the opposite page, there was a poem. It described how beauty and truth mattered more than anything else. They were the same thing.
But it didn't matter how pretty you painted the world.
Brenna Yovanoff
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Roses are red,
violets are blue,
I'm sick of this poem,
you probably are too.
Anne Mazer
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In a machine, every part has a function. In a poem, every word needs to be there.
Elaine Equi
