Quotes About Great Poems

#1. I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

Donald Hall

#2. I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.

Mark Nepo

#3. 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

#4. Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a

Joseph Campbell

#5. I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Matthea Harvey

#6. The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

David Whyte

#7. 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

#8. Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar's heritage

Yvor Winters

#9. There's so much to think about when you're becoming an adult, and there's so many great poems about that apprehension and excitement.

Caroline Kennedy

#10. It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.

Henry David Thoreau

#11. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

William H Gass

#12. You'll be a poorer person all your life if you don't know some of the great stories and great poems.

Walt Disney Company

#13. The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

Wallace Stevens

#14. I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.

Honore De Balzac

#15. What! have you no poems by heart, no great songs, no verses from the Bible, no speeches from Shakespeare? Then you have not begun to read, you have not learned how to read.

John Macy

#16. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past

G.K. Chesterton

#17. I take pride in never being rude to anyone on this earth, which contains a great number of unbearable villains who set upon you to recount their sufferings and even recite their poems.

Heinrich Heine

#18. I hope that most people at this point in time realize that Prince is one of the great poets of our time. I didn't say songwriter - I said poet. Prince is the closest thing we have to e. e. cummings and people are so stupid because they don't come in here and buy books of Prince poems. It

Caroline Kepnes

#19. I'm working on poems about work, I guess. Or related to work. Which sounds dull as drywall but I'm having great fun working the vernacular of work into poems. I'm also writing some poems about family. And I don't know, just writing. Taking breaks. Writing some more.

Randall Mann

#20. Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them.

Ellen J. Barrier

#21. Garrison Keillor read several of my poems on 'The Writer's Almanac' and I've heard from listeners nationally and internationally. That's one of the great gifts of email.

Ellen Bass

#22. All the stories and poems and letters and oracles and wisdom verses of God's Word, like individual instruments in a great orchestra, serve THE WHOLE story.

James MacDonald

#23. Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.

Jane Hirshfield

#24. What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,
for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Hugh Kenner

#26. I've always felt that the poems I've written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let's write about that. In every case what has happened is that I've become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn't shake it.

Rita Dove

#27. But love of one kind will never duplicate itself. Love has its variety...which possibly makes it as a great as all the songs and stories and poems.

Dan Skinner

#28. 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

#29. I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

Billy Collins

#30. Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.

Lady Gregory

#31. 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

#32. Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.

David Whyte

#33. It's the process of writing and life that matters.Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.

Natalie Goldberg

#34. The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

Wilhelm Reich

#35. His conversation was full of imagination, and very often in limitation of ther Persian, and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion. At other times he repeated my fsvorite poems or drew me out into arguments, wich he suported with great ingenuity.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

#36. I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own
memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called
rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,
a great human gift disowned.

Grace Paley

#37. I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

#38. However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

Helen Dunmore

#39. If I were to die thinking that I'd written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn't lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us - well, I would settle for a handful.

Andrew Motion

#40. Some poems are written great, some poems are written swell. But then there are poems that could win a prize in Hell.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#41. I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.

Anne Stevenson

#42. Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.

Bayard Taylor

#43. People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

Helen Fisher

#44. When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone.

Edward Hirsch

#45. I felt very bad in Washington ... I didn't like my job, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and I was cold and half-hungry, so I wrote a great many poems.

Langston Hughes

#46. The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things ... the trivial pleasure like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.

Barbara Pym

#47. I have a vast 'bone pile' of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.

Maxine Kumin

#48. That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though.

Jane Green

#49. I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.

Carolyn Kizer

#50. The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

Antonio Machado

#51. We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches.

Anna Akhmatova

#52. 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

#53. The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#54. Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine-featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. And I loved her for that.

Dorothy Allison