Top 61 Quotes About Good Poems
#1. Good acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood.
Albert Einstein
#2. All good poems are victories over something.
Stephen Dunn
#3. Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
Harry Mathews
#5. To write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
Mary Oliver
#6. I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.
Edward Hirsch
#7. Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
#8. I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
Edward Hirsch
#9. Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
Jane Hirshfield
#10. I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.
Billy Collins
#11. It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
Clive James
#12. Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them.
Neil Gaiman
#13. Women are like beautiful flowers. Only when you love them and take good care of them will they fully bloom into the beautiful flowers that they are.
Avijeet Das
#14. Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.
Eileen Myles
#15. The wall between writing and painting is just good grammar.
Moderation in moderation.
Fun is scary with a happy ending.
Just love. If love doesn't transform that which annoys you, it will be easier to tolerate.
Emily Thornton Calvo
#16. There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
#17. I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.
Diane Wakoski
#18. In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.
August Wilson
#19. 2.07 WALK OF LIFE
Life but like a cycle that you be riding,
You will fall if you ever stop peddling,
Life not of good cards you be holding,
But those held and how you be playing.
[68] - 4
Munindra Misra
#20. loved the poems so much that I decided to try writing one. Feels real good to just write out lines about whatever you're feeling. You should try it sometime." "It sounds very good, sir." "I wrote one for Cindy, but she didn't like it much, so I just write for myself now.
Imbolo Mbue
#21. Good folk, I have no coin,
To take were to purloin:
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either,
And all my gold is on the furze
That shakes in windy weather
Above the rusy heather.
Christina Rossetti
#22. I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to tinker - I'm more likely to destroy.
Michael Longley
#23. Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.
Henry Ward Beecher
#24. Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.
Peter Davison
#25. Trying to build myself up with the fact that I have done things right that were even good and have had moments that were excellent but the bad is heavier to carry around and feel have no confidence.
Marilyn Monroe
#26. It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
Philip Larkin
#27. be good to yourself
you're the only you
you'll ever get
R H Sin
#28. My favorite subject was English or creative writing. We did poems and making a magazine, and I did one on celebrities. I called it 'Celebrity Life Magazine.' I interviewed my good friend Kaley Cuoco.
Ashley Tisdale
#29. Don't start talkin about books or quotin poems at them. these is good folks but they ain't real crazy about readin books. just do what i do and you'll be all right.
William Gay
#30. The poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
#31. Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there
put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet.
Daniel Handler
#32. How are his poems?"
"He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.
Charles Bukowski
#33. 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
#34. Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts.
Stephen Karam
#35. Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads ...
Joseph Epstein
#36. 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
#37. There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
Robert Adamson
#38. You are afraid to let anyone in, but you still leave the door open, hoping someone good will shut the door behind him and throw away the keys.
Jenim Dibie
#39. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem.
Ashley Hay
#40. Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my Friend.
Martial
#41. God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
W. H. Auden
#42. I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
Leslie Fiedler
#43. If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
Randall Jarrell
#45. I always write stories, and I write poems, too. I just never sell them to anybody, but I write them. They're good, too. They never leave the house. They're too disclosing.
Richard Bausch
#46. The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
Clifton Fadiman
#47. Remember that good poets too can write bad poems! Talent has also a talent to be untalented!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#48. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.
Sylvia Plath
#49. With poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#50. I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.
Ray Bradbury
#51. I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.
Walter Dean Myers
#52. Sad that there is books that are based on bad events that has happened. But there is books that has been based on really good events. I like to read the ones that are based on both.
Dawn Huntsman
#53. I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.
Umberto Eco
#54. But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
Robert Graves
#55. I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.
Simon Armitage
#56. William Carlos Williams, late in his long life, had a dream: He saw an enormous spiral staircase in empty space, and his father slowly descending toward him. When he reached the bottom, his father walked over, looked him in the eye and said: "You know those poems you're writing? They're no good."
Eliot Weinberger
#57. Oh happy day! A day to make a hay! And when it is mid-day, think about the day! And when you think about the day, don't forget the hay! Oh happy day! A day to make a hay!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#58. I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.
Maya Angelou
#59. How do your poems start out?" "They start as a lump in the throat," she said. "Isn't that normally just a cocktail olive lodged there?" Olivier asked. "Once," Ruth admitted. "Wrote quite a good poem before I coughed it up.
Louise Penny
#60. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him - but he was a good and faithful horse.
-Frank
From "Eulogy for a Percheron" in "The Horse Lawyer and Other Poems
Greg Seeley
#61. I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.
Lewis Carroll
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
