Top 100 A Poem Quotes
#1. I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Steven Wright
#2. The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, 'To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.' Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it's a good slogan, I think.
Robert Pinsky
#3. Nix," I said, and her name was a poem. She tilted her face up to the dawn; my lips met hers. She pressed close to me, and then there was no past, no future - only now. No her, no me. Only us.
Heidi Heilig
#4. A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.
Douglas Dunn
#5. When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.
Michael Longley
#6. All I know, all I can comprehend of the mathematics of a life, are the times your hand is inside my hand, and the times it is not.
Tyler Knott Gregson
#7. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#8. The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
Billy Collins
#9. A well crafted life is like a good poem. What is left out tells others every bit as much about you as what is added in.
Eric Vance Walton
#10. First, a poem must be magical, then musical as a sea-gull and it must hold fire as well.
Jose Garcia Villa
#11. I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.
W. H. Auden
#12. Instead of noting down things I'm unlikely to forget, I will write a poem. Even if I have never written one before and even if I never do so again, I will at least know that I once had the courage to put my feelings into words.
Paulo Coelho
#13. Well: the day is a poem but too much Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.
Robinson Jeffers
#14. DeLois lived up the block on 142nd Street and never had her hair done, and all the neighbourhood women sucked their teeth as she walked by. Her crispy hair twinkled in the summer sun as her big proud stomach moved her on down the block while I watched, not caring whether or not she was a poem.
Audre Lorde
#15. To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative.
Nicholas Mosley
#16. If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.
Luis Gonzalez
#17. I've made a lot of choices, some good, some not so good; how sad for those who merely hitchhike along, never daring to choose at all.
C.J. Heck
#18. I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Marilyn Hacker
#19. I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.
Philip Schultz
#20. I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
Edgar Allan Poe
#21. I don't have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.
Flannery O'Connor
#22. When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.
Billy Collins
#23. A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.
Edward Hirsch
#24. In this quiet place on a quiet street
where no one ever finds us
gently, lovingly, freedom gives back our pain.
from poem In a Quiet Place on a Quiet Street
Aberjhani
#25. It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.
Eileen Myles
#26. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany.
Terry Pratchett
#27. I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.
Matt Haig
#28. A writer draws a road map where readers walks with their love, joy, anger, tears, and dismay. Every story, every poem, has different meanings for every reader.
Debasish Mridha
#29. For me,the Bild-Dichtung [image-poem] is the ideal form,because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing,the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.
Gunter Brus
#30. The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life ...
A.S. Byatt
#31. The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#32. I have always been a fire, and everyone I loved walked away as ashes, until I met a phoenix who was born to love flames.
Jenim Dibie
#33. When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
Stephen Spender
#34. A living poem had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.
Nicholas Sparks
#35. Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.
Jim Goetz
#36. Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails - and Imagination the rudder.
John Keats
#37. TOMORROW'S WILL
Silent world, I find myself,
Glad no one hears my thoughts.
In dark cocoon, I hibernate,
Yet spirit spills every thought.
A second chance to try again.
The risks I know too well.
Two sunsets turning into six-
Awaits tomorrow's will.
Giorge Leedy
#38. That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining - meaning, don't ignore the honest muttering in your head.
Alice Oswald
#39. It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
Donald Hall
#40. Very possibly this was the night my white-knight complex, as Solange put it, would get me killed. Someone had better write a poem about it. It was only fair.
Alyxandra Harvey
#41. Every poem can be considered in two ways
as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
C.S. Lewis
#42. One Christmas I had no money, and so I went home and just, like, wrote a poem; I mean, I didn't write them, but I just handed out poems as Christmas presents. Like, 'Here's a Pablo Neruda poem that really made me think of you.'
June Diane Raphael
#43. A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.
Nan Fairbrother
#44. Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.
Bob Dylan
#45. our foundation is rocky
because we made a home
in each other's skin.
the damage is beginning
to show.
K.Y. Robinson
#46. Were you always such a stubborn, blind, obtuse girl?"
"Are you calling me stupid?"
"Yes, but in a more poetic way!"
"Well, here's a poem for you. Get lost!
Colleen Houck
#47. My wild heart craves shadows. Like a bat unfurling its wings, I open myself to darkness; I open myself to truth.
Nichole McElhaney
#49. If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.
Kathy Acker
#50. The progress of our soul is like a perfect poem. It has an infinite idea which, once realised, makes all movements full of meaning and joy.
Rabindranath Tagore
#51. I recall that one of the first investment bankers I met taught me a poem. God gave you eyes, plagiarize. A
Michael Lewis
#52. The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.
George Saintsbury
#53. A good poem has rhyming but no ending, it continues to rhyme in our heart.
Debasish Mridha
#54. It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle,
Vladimir Nabokov
#55. It is a novel constructed like a poem, where each character is only exceptional because if the hyperbolic manner in which he represents generality.
Victor Hugo
#57. A mask you ask? Optional I find!
Masks lend appeal of a mysterious kind.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#59. I often ask the question: Is it impossible to have a simple life?
The world is not simple, Claire said.
The world is not simple. Joe repeated the phrase like the line of a great poem.
Elizabeth Brundage
#60. Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true
Poem on His Birthday
Dylan Thomas
#61. The Gita is not an aphoristic work, it is a great religious poem.
Mahatma Gandhi
#62. Be there a picnic for the devil,
an orgy for the satyr,
and a wedding for the bride.
Roman Payne
#63. He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
Thomas Carlyle
#64. I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.
Robert Bly
#65. My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
Philip Levine
#66. Solitude is an unmarked place beyond the borders of the map, a place where most fear to tread. It's no surprise, then, that this is where the greatest secrets and most valuable treasures are hidden.
Cristen Rodgers
#67. O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.
From the poem "Cut", 24 October 1962
Sylvia Plath
#68. To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.
John Ciardi
#69. Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
Eileen Myles
#70. You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.
Janet Fitch
#71. I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.
Louis MacNeice
#72. She wore her scars
as her best attire.
A stunning dress
made of hellfire.
Daniel Saint
#73. He offered his love ... she could not bother,
She gives her love to the other! The other!
E.A. Bucchianeri
#74. History has proven that it's impossible to crush the artist. There's always gonna be a need for somebody to write a poem or sing a song about something, about life - that makes it real. There's the word that goes beyond the word.
Mos Def
#75. Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.
Tracy K. Smith
#76. In the forestlichen writhes and assembles itself into signs to light my path through the deep dark north shadow; and I emerge at last onto a hillside strewn with logogrammatic stones, and scramble away from spruce tops." in the poem "Beyond the Beacon" from Terra Affirmative.
Jay Woodman
#77. Shade for a man
And shelter for animals,
Planted in your name,
May you be the same for those around you,
Every year the same.
Nancy J Cavanaugh
#78. The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.
Robert Fitzgerald
#79. Sing a song, read a poem, paint a picture, hear the music ... Rise up and touch the stars
Susan Polis Schutz
#80. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.
Charles Olson
#81. I have a personal little routine that I do in my dressing room just to kind of get myself mentally prepared to go on stage, and part of that is a poem that I read to myself.
Orlando Bloom
#82. I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that every happened to you.
Donald Hall
#83. I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
Raymond Chandler
#84. Do not listen to what any society tells you about the body - the body is the metaphor for all experience. A woman's body more than any other. Like language, its beautiful but weaker sister. Look at this poem. This painting. Look at these photographs. The body doesn't lie.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#85. I take pictures, and they are there for the taking. I'll tell you a quote that I have always thought about. Arthur Miller said, I try to create the poem from the evidence.
Jay Maisel
#86. Both the poet and scholar are trying to learn something. The poem for me is a pursuit. Some of the answers are within. Some of the answers are without.
Gregory Pardlo
#87. The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
Jane Hirshfield
#88. I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#89. He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon.
T. S. Eliot
#90. I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.
Sharon Creech
#91. A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.
Marianne Boruch
#92. A poem in the heart is worth
more than a million dollars
in the bank account.
Sanober Khan
#93. People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.
Alice Oswald
#94. A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
#96. You grow. You are large.
You are a 19th century poem.
All of America is inside you,
a catalogue of lives and land
and burrowing things.
-From "Catalogue
Donika Kelly
#97. A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
Diane Ackerman
#98. All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.
Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem
Hunter S. Thompson
#99. I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet.
Adrienne Rich
#100. Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
Matthea Harvey
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