Top 100 Poem Of Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Roses are red,
violets are blue,
I'm sick of this poem,
you probably are too.
Anne Mazer
#4. And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, Wild Gratitude, and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title August 13th.
Edward Hirsch
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It
Mary Oliver
#9. In ancient Jewish tradition, as far back as we can tell, the Song of Songs was not interpreted as a love poem or as an allegory of the individual soul; it was interpreted as an allegory of God's spousal love for the people of Israel.
Brant Pitre
#10. We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#11. In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.
Karen Russell
#12. I never have restricted myself into a frame of a particular technique. My techniques are determined simultaneously along with the subjects of my works. It is similar to the works of a poet, the form of a poem is determined at the same time as its content.
Guity Novin
#13. The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an "object." This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.
Wendell Berry
#14. Undeniable obsession of words that quickens my spirit.
Euginia Herlihy
#15. Beneath her curls, I forget the world,
With a mere gaze she raises my hopes of gold.
Love is as much in her heart as in mine,
But she doesn't say it, her punishment so divine.
Faraaz Kazi
#16. A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
Rebecca West
#17. If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
E. E. Cummings
#18. One day you will take me completely out of myself, I'll do what the angels cannot do. Your eyelash will write on my cheek the poem that hasn't been thought of.
Rumi
#19. Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is about speaking. To 'get' the poem is to hear the eloquence of the silence that it calls forth through its manifestation of love.
David Patterson
#20. Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable ... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.
Marie Howe
#21. I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.
Pattiann Rogers
#22. He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this.
from a Difference in Temperament
Daphne Du Maurier
#23. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Theodore Bikel
#24. Where there are many beauties in a poem I shall not cavil at a few faults proceeding either from negligence or from the imperfection of our nature.
Horace
#25. I long for
a little life,
an everyday life,
a splash of sunlight
through a window
a smile from a stranger -
a heart to hold in mine.
Menna Van Praag
#26. There's plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.
Thomas Lux
#27. Like a poem that's aware
of the silence of things
you speak so as not to see me
Alejandra Pizarnik
#28. Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints
Edith Sitwell
#29. Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my participation in what is real, my engagement with voices and images. This is why a poem speaks not of ideal life but of actual life: the angle of a window; the reverberation of streets, cities, rooms; shadows along a wall.
Sophia De Mello Breyner Andresen
#30. So how many of you liked the poem?" Ms. Whitlock asks.
The entire class raises their hands. The entire class, except for me and Razor.
Katie McGarry
#31. The incredible cinematography makes 'A Walk to Beautiful' almost like a poem; there is a tenderness on display that seems to emanate from the camera. There is also great sensitivity to the women whose stories are being told - never did I have a sense of the subjects being exploited.
Abraham Verghese
#32. What is the point of teaching how to analyse a poem or a piece of Shakespeare but not to analyse the Internet?
Beeban Kidron
#33. Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.
Eileen Myles
#34. When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.
Eileen Myles
#35. You want the secret off my succes; my recipe? I have always brought the same care to making an adventure novel, a serialized novel, that others would bring to the making of a poem. My ambition was to raise the level of this much maligned genre.
Gaston Leroux
#36. Your eyelashes will write on my heart
the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.
Rumi
#37. A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem.
Alejo Carpentier
#38. The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
#39. Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization of the self that you don't have to engage in in the essay. In fact, the essay is a more social medium than the poem.
Vijay Seshadri
#40. The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.
George Steiner
#41. For what is the point of
having something lovely if you never share it?
It would be like having a poem, a beautiful wild poem that no
one else has, and burning it.
Ally Condie
#42. Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, - knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
Wilfred Owen
#43. Unfurl your muscles. Slip off your skin. Drop your guts in a heap on the floor."
I felt my airway constrict. Damn, this was profound. I continued. "Nuzzle inside the hollow of my bones. Let our breaths mingle as one. Turn liquid for me. Only for me. Bury your essence inside of my soul.
Christina Lee
#44. I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my
verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have
shunned wit steeped in venom
not a letter of mine is dipped
in poisonous jest.
Ovid
#45. One of my favorite passages in 'Leaves of Grass,' that breathless, exuberant poem so rich and full of innocence and joy and generosity and compassion, is 'Mannahatta.'
Cathleen Schine
#46. With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.
Roman Payne
#47. I stand alone, a woman, a girl, and a child.
Unsuccessful at my first attempts of a poem
I am miserable when I fail.
Abigail George
#48. Contrary to popular belief, there aren't that many descriptions of hell in the Bible, and the majority of images most people carry around in their heads are from the fourteenth-century poem, which means that our contemporary view of hell is actually from the Middle Ages.
Craig Johnson
#49. Lollypop
... the passion contained merely kisses
placed upon lips, neck and cheek
these young lovers of the castle
of which our fairytale speaks ...
Muse
#50. Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which the poem itself has to respond to.
James Fenton
#51. Dance,' they told me, and I stood still,
and while I stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.
'Pray,' they said, and I laughed,
covering myself in the earth's brightnesses,
and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel,
and prayed like an orphan.
Wendell Berry
#52. A short poem from my book:
Perspective
Of course
there is a hell
she said
and it has
an observation deck;
so I may
stand and wave
to all those kind
souls below
who warned me
I would go there.
Michelle Hartman
#53. I loved you for a thousand years and missed you in all of them.
Christina Strigas
#54. Tumbling-hair
picker of buttercups
violets
dandelions
And the big bullying daisies
through the field wonderful
with eyes a little sorry
Another comes
also picking flowers
E. E. Cummings
#55. It takes something of a poet to apprehend and get into the depth, the lusciousness, the spiritual life of a great poem. And so we must be in some way like God in order that we may see God as He is.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#56. Always-
the sharp,
plaintive edge
on the rim
of the spoon
of my giving.
(lines 8-13 of the poem 'Confessions')
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno
#57. We can live quiet, apparently sedate lives if we express our wildness by risking and leaping in our writing...The strangest, most far-out renegade part of ourselves can be expressed in a poem while we sit quietly in our kitchen or bedroom. This can save our lives
Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge
#58. The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
Muriel Rukeyser
#59. The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
George Steiner
#60. It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.
Edgar Allan Poe
#61. People are jostling at the gates of heaven or Department stores
Words are bumping into each other
("Poem")
Raymond Radiguet
#62. People need what they think of as a poem to be read at their bar mitzvah, their wedding, a funeral, whatever. And people are looking for hope and inspiration. I understand that.
Joan Larkin
#63. Cradle of Solitude
For we know not why our tribulations
are given as such
our fragile forms
created from the dust ...
Muse
#64. Will read a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh at his grandmother's funeral.
"Pondering the joys we had, listen & keep very still. If the lowing from the hill or the tolling of the bell do not
serve to break the spell, listen: you may be allowed to hear my laughter from a cloud.
Lynne Branard
#65. The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
Paul Auster
#66. You're growing up. And rain sort of remains on the branches of a tree that will someday rule the Earth. And it's good that there is rain. It clears the month of your sorry rainbow expressions, and it clears the streets of the silent armies ... so we can dance.
Jim Carroll
#67. I want to
peel away all the labels
I had once given to others
and place them
upon the fabric
of my own identity.
They have reflected back to me,
everything that I refuse
to See in myself.
Meraaqi
#68. If I were to choose between the power of writing a poem and the ecstasy of a poem unwritten, I would choose the ecstasy. It is better poetry.
Kahlil Gibran
#69. Another day without no rain, is another day of sorrow.
And if it doesn't rain today, I hope it rains tomorrow.
J.M. Carydice
#71. I'm looking for you
into that silver
spoon where I taste my reflection
to feel the touch of your untouchables
- from the poem Looking For You
Munia Khan
#72. I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.
Billy Collins
#73. When the Divine Artist would produce a poem, He plants a germ of it in a human soul, and out of that soul the poem springs and grows as from the rose-tree the rose.
James A. Garfield
#74. You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Wallace Stevens
#75. A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text.
Louise Rosenblatt
#76. Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
Octavio Paz
#77. Red sings like summer in the shadows, hot on my tongue ...
Nell Grey
#78. Ya got cigarettes?" she asks. "Yes," I say,
"I got cigarettes." "Matches?" she asks.
"Enough to burn Rome." "Whiskey?"
"Enough whiskey for a Mississippi River
of pain." "You drunk?" "Not yet.
Charles Bukowski
#79. These are the ashes of fiery weather,
Of nights full of the green stars from Ireland,
Wet out of the sea, and luminously wet,
Like beautiful and abandonded refugees.
Wallace Stevens
#80. He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem "spoke to him" it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul.
Claire Messud
#81. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#82. I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we're drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.
Billy Collins
#83. We are all of life
who stepped from the sea
trading weightless journeys of the currents
We are all of life
who build and tear down and build again
to find gold and silver
to find scars that weep and bleed
to step from the sea
to stay with the sea
Tamara Rendell
#85. Do You Believe
Do you believe
that I have loved you
since the dawn of time?
Do you believe
that we were destined
to be intertwined? ...
Muse
#86. Quart of whiskey a day for months working hard on a long poem. Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Murderous and suicidal. Many hospitalizations, many alibis.
James Taylor
#87. For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line.
John Kinsella
#88. I will not waste it arguing about the merits of this short story or that poem. Why would I, when all such opinions are subjective, and no final resolution can ever be reached?" Some
Stephen King
#89. No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell's Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft.
Tom Robbins
#90. Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
Seamus Heaney
#91. Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
Edward Hirsch
#92. Yet, beauty cannot be forgotten,
Eternal Wisdom can never die ...
E.A. Bucchianeri
#93. Poetry is the sister of Sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem.
Marc-Andre Fleury
#94. And how unfair it would be to torture your heart in never feeling again, because of a feeling you haven't even tried to understand yet.
Nikki Rowe
#95. To a poet, it's quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I'm not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.
Billy Collins
#96. From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it.
Mark Strand
#97. Depending on who I am talking about or who's talking through me - if the person is a kind of hip-hop, or rhythm and blues person, or if the person is a kind of old-fashion gothic, meaning gothic attitude, then that will determine what form the poem will take.
Maya Angelou
#98. That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.
Ben Lerner
#99. Music helps to forget
This forsaken tomb,
That is my abode
Cellars down
Far below
Under the ground, ...
E.A. Bucchianeri
#100. The sky can never be frozen
because its vastness has chosen
all warmth of our lives as we look above
with unbreakable hearts armoured in love
Munia Khan
