Top 100 A Poem Quotes
#1. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,
Anonymous
#2. When I'm most deeply involved in my writing, sometimes I do dream about poetry, and occasionally I wake up from a dream with a phrase that I like well enough to put it in a poem.
James Arthur
#4. When you read and understand a poem, then you master chaos a little.
Stephen Spender
#6. One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
Billy Collins
#7. I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing
I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.
Natasha Trethewey
#8. A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
Hilary Mantel
#9. Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.
Henry David Thoreau
#10. She sat on the end of Blue's bed, looking as soft as a poem in the dim light.
Maggie Stiefvater
#11. You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.
Robert Frost
#12. Not only has volume been ratcheted up but expectations have, too. Quiet success
painting a picture, writing a poem, writing an algorithm
is all well and good, but if you haven't become famous doing it, then did it really matter?
Sophia Dembling
#13. A picture is a voiceless poem, a poem is a vocal picture.
Anonymous
#16. A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.
James Fenton
#17. I'll
vacuum up my stale hair, I'll
pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up ...
Anne Sexton
#19. I was always cutting words. I even would write my jokes in my notebook. I still do this, almost like a poem.
Anthony Jeselnik
#20. Making a poem is like making a chair; a poem is as real as a chair and sometimes more useful.
Rebecca Solnit
#21. Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.
Joanna Newsom
#22. When a poem doesn't work, the first question to ask yourself is, 'Am I telling the truth?'
Wendy Cope
#23. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
Tom Stoppard
#24. Even if a poem is beautiful and memorable, it's not like an advertising jingle or propaganda, which attempt to convince and control. Poems seek to confuse, disabuse, enlarge understanding, and make people ask questions and think for themselves.
Rachel Zucker
#25. A poem, novel or play that does not in some sense relate to previous texts is, in fact, literally unimaginable.
Andrew Bennett
#26. I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says 'The Road Not Taken,' which is a poem by Robert Frost.
Steven R. McQueen
#27. Love is a song, written in your heart.
The moon is a poem in a starry night.
Debasish Mridha
#28. I hope to go into a poem sober and come out a little drunk. And if I do then that's a real poem.
Dannie Abse
#29. Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?
Dorothy Fields
#30. To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
Lawrence Durrell
#31. I have always wanted to midcourse-correct (or undermine) in a poem, and let that be the turn. That poem is to do with displacement, with almosts - even the rhymes are intentionally off.
Randall Mann
#32. To summarize a poem or put it into prose is quite simply to misunderstand the essence of an art.
Paul Valery
#33. A poem does not exist in and of itself but instead exists only in relation to the human being, Wilhelm wrote to Savigny, just as the sun in effect does not shine when we have our eyes closed.
Ann Schmiesing
#34. Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
#35. Words in a poem are like petals on a flower, only together, in the right position, at the right time are they seen as they should be.
David McDonald
#36. My luck was without equal, my life was a poem, and I was certain that one day, someone was going to write the beautiful tale of my dental autobiography. End of story.
Valeria Luiselli
#37. One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.
Alfred Jarry
#38. It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it's what a poem does with its eyes.
Mary Ruefle
#39. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sakes. Now, I mean, I'm talking about singing in the shower, I'm talking about dancing to the radio, I'm talking about writing a poem to a friend
a lousy poem.
Kurt Vonnegut
#40. Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master ... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
Charles Bukowski
#41. Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#42. One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.
Stephen Dobyns
#43. I like to quote the words of Kierkegaard, that 'life ia a poem that we are able to write ourselves; but a Christian lets God write his life's poem.
Nathan Soderblom
#44. Don't you think every face tells its own story? Like a book? More like a poem. If you study it long enough, you'll soon find its meaning.
Gail Tsukiyama
#47. I didn't dare look at Conrad. I was afraid my love for him and my need for him to say yes would be written on my face like a poem.
Jenny Han
#48. A poem is no place for an idea.
E.W. Howe
#49. ... what I told them was 'a poem,' a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#50. The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem
Marcel Duchamp
#51. The course of a man's destiny can seem sharply altered by a sudden illumination. But illumination is no more than the Spirit's sudden vision of a road that is long prepared. Gradually I learned grammar. I practiced syntax. My feelings were awakened. Then a poem suddenly blazed in my heart.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#52. For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.
Tracy K. Smith
#53. If you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that's a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don't like the melodies, and vice versa.
Harry Connick Jr.
#54. It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.
Erica Jong
#55. I do read a poem almost every morning. Unless I'm really, really late, I have to get my poem in.
Sue Monk Kidd
#56. There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
Henry David Thoreau
#57. You smell like a bar," he said.
I thought, You smell like a library. But I wanted to have sex right then, so I said, "You smell like a poem.
Melissa Bank
#58. A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.
Mary Ruefle
#59. You must believe a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is.
Theodore Roethke
#60. If you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff you haven't even climbed. This is a lesson that can only be learned by trial and error.
Mary Ruefle
#61. One of my greatest joys is poetry. I read it almost every day, and I've even taken a stab at writing some of my own. A poem I wrote for my mother when she was dying really helped me get through that hard time.
Maria Shriver
#62. I don't see why a poem couldn't be spoken out a car window or written on the beach at low tide. In fact, I'm sure people are doing it.
James Arthur
#63. I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.
Billy Collins
#64. A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.
Natasha Trethewey
#65. A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
Robert Frost
#66. Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.
Sylvia Plath
#67. To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.
X.J. Kennedy
#68. A poem is a neutrino - mainly nothing - it has no mass and can pass through the earth undetected.
Mary Ruefle
#69. There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
Billy Collins
#70. The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
James Fenton
#71. It is raining! In other words little poems are coming down from the sky! Nature is literature! Sun is a fable; forest is a story; birds are a theatre; mountains are a myth; rain is a poem! Nature is literature!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#72. A poem is good until one knows by whom it is.
Karl Kraus
#73. There's a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called "Splittings" that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: "I choose to love this time fore once / with all my intelligence.
Cheryl Strayed
#74. What else is a poem about?
The rhythm and the images buried in the language. All the ways you can build an emotion with words, but you can't just write 'I feel sad.' I mean, you can, but it's not poetry ... I think it has to be experienced instead of studied. You step into it.
Garret Freymann-Weyr
#75. A poem is like a painting.
Horace
#76. A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/ ... the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.
William Carlos Williams
#77. A poem begins as I look into your eyes, as I kiss your lips, as I grasp your hair, a sense of happiness, a breathless suspire , the lovesickness of my restless heart ...
Alejandro Perez
#78. Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.
Charles Baudelaire
#79. My poetry is often criticized for a failure to communicate, but I take issue with this; my intention is to communicate and my feeling is that a poem that communicates something that's already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him.
John Ashbery
#80. There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.
Mark Doty
#81. The writing of a poem is, for me, in the first place, an almost total act of abandon leading to discovery leading to recognition.
Marvin Bell
#82. There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song.
Masanobu Fukuoka
#83. At nineteen they can card you in the bars and tell you to get the fuck out, put your sorry act (and sorrier ass) back on the street, but they can't card you when you sit down to paint a picture, write a poem, or tell a story.
Stephen King
#84. A poem begins as a lump in the throat? Gamache asked Ruth. The elderly woman held his eyes
Louise Penny
#85. A set of excellent questions themselves is perhaps like a poem, both philosophical and intellectual.
Pearl Zhu
#86. I find that the thoughts spoken between the lines are the most important parts of a poem or story.
Lynn Cullen
#87. The "truth" is the poem itself. Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes.
Denise Duhamel
#88. Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.
Thomas Lynch
#89. To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance
not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.
Richard Hugo
#90. Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.
Theodore Roethke
#91. I told her it takes
a lot of solitude to write a poem.
She told me it takes a lot of solitude
to die.
Ronald Baatz
#92. I am aware that a computer can't create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.
Charles Bukowski
#93. It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.
Anne Sexton
#94. It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.
Brian Ferneyhough
#95. To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege.
Emil M. Cioran
#96. Only in the tamed trembling of a poem, I had believed
Some kindness might survive
Rodney Jones
#97. A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
A.R. Ammons
#98. Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.
Charles Bukowski
#99. I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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