Quotes About A Great Poem

#1. We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

#2. 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

#3. Mathematics is very much like poetry ... what makes a good poem
a great poem
is that there is a large amount of thought expressed in very few words. In this sense formulas like
or are poems.

Lipman Bers

#4. Language, a great poem in and of itself, is all around us. We live in the lap of enormous wonder, but how rarely do most of us look up and smile in gratitude and pleasure?

Mark Edmundson

#5. Chesterton never achieves a great poem because his poems are compilations of statements not intensely felt but only intensely meant.

Hugh Kenner

#6. Nowadays we are fond of literal translations ... That would have seemed a crime to translators in ages past ... They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as capable of a great poem as the original.

Jorge Luis Borges

#7. A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning.

Walt Whitman

#8. If somebody writes a great poem, people don't run around applauding the pencil, saying 'Oh, what a great pencil' ... I'm a pencil in God's hands.

Keith Green

#9. The world is a great poem, and the world's
The words it is writ in, and we souls the thoughts.

Philip James Bailey

#10. A great poem leaves so much room for everybody to have such a different reaction to it.

Spike Jonze

#11. It has been a Prosy day for us, but for some people it has been a wonderful day. Someone was rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done somewhere today- a great poem written- or a great man born. And some heart has been broken, Phil.

L.M. Montgomery

#12. I've only written one decent poem in my life called "Lizard up My Leg": A lizard up my leg gave me a fright Not because he did, but 'cause he might. Okay, not a great poem, but it's honest and also it's short so I can remember it.

Danny Rubin

#13. And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Walt Whitman

#14. 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

#15. It has been a prosy day for us," she said thoughtfully, "but to some people it has been a wonderful day. Some one has been rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done somewhere today-- or a great poem written-- or a great man born.

L.M. Montgomery

#16. Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem.

Paul Nurse

#17. When I encountered "The Lady of Shallot" (to take a "for instance" allusion from the many in the book, this one from the "Etiology" section) it was still considered a "great poem." What does that poem - or rather a particular presentation of that poem (hey, admire this!) - do to a young woman?

Laura Mullen

#18. Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

Billy Collins

#19. Offering
I made a poem going
to sleep last night, woke
in sunlight, it was clean forgotten.
If it was any good, gods
of the great darkness
where sleep goes and farther
death goes, you not named,
then as true offering
accept it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#20. Andrew is going to be one of my problems. Dean thinks it's great fun
he knows what is in the wind as well as I do. He is always teasing me about my red-headed young man
my r.h.y.m. for short.
"He's almost a rhyme," said Dean.
"But never a poem," said I.

L.M. Montgomery

#21. The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.

Edward Hirsch

#22. This is how it always is when I finish a poem. A great silence overcomes me and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.

Rumi

#23. I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.

Richard Wilbur

#24. How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose? And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as this great volume of the world?

John Tillotson

#25. 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

#26. The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period.

Brian Aldiss

#27. 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.

#28. When I see great boxers, it's like reading a wonderful poem.

Liam Neeson

#29. 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

#30. How many great gems were lost to thought
and not put down to pen.
You can but think of just a few
and then they're lost again.

L.F.Young

#31. If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

Sharon Olds

#32. The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both.

August Wilson

#33. For the scientist the analytical process does not diminish the splendour of what he or she sees. Every detail added is an extra stanza added to a great epic poem, one that is never complete, nor yet ever tedious in its particulars

Richard Fortey

#34. The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the image simply arrived. But surely such a thing has happened. And it matters to me that it has, or could.

Jane Hirshfield

#35. When I say be creative I don't mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.

Osho

#36. If you subtracted all of the great artists who never drank, who never went to excess, you wouldn't have any more art left. What kind of poem are you gonna get out of a glass of iced tea?

David Lee Roth

#37. I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

Thom Gunn

#38. This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel, America, a brash motion picture in technicolor ...

Jess Walter

#39. 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

#40. If the feet of enlightenment moved, the great ocean would overflow; If that head bowed, it would look down upon the heavens.
Such a body has no place to rest. . . .
Let another continue this poem.

Paul Reps

#41. One day, I just got up to read a poem and started singing. I looked around - the reaction was great. And I said, 'Oh, boy. I like this.'

Jill Scott

#42. My own emotional health issues were bullying me during the time I was drafting that poem. It was a pressure I couldn't pin down or diagnose. And like many, if not most, writers I had the self-consciousness to recognize it made great conditions for writing.

Gregory Pardlo

#43. The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem.

May Swenson

#44. But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire ... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.

Henry David Thoreau

#45. 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

#46. The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech ... For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

Herbert Read

#47. If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.

Sylvia Plath

#48. The Gita is not an aphoristic work, it is a great religious poem.

Mahatma Gandhi

#49. 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