Top 100 Quotes About Poems
#1. I have seen the universe! It is made of poems!
Sjon
#4. I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.
Amy Lowell
#5. 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
#6. For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.
Kate DiCamillo
#7. How are his poems?"
"He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.
Charles Bukowski
#8. I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best.
James Tate
#9. The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.
Lactantius
#10. Humor is essential to survival. Funny poems are vastly underrated. Very underwritten.
Rachel Zucker
#11. And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems.
Donna George Storey
#12. Poems don't have to rhyme. Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.
Nikki Giovanni
#13. This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue's wrangle,
the world's pottage, the rat's star.
Anne Sexton
#14. Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off.
Matthea Harvey
#15. We hold the moon in our bellies and fire in our hearts. We bleed We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words grow. They are our children. They are our stores and poems.
Terry Tempest Williams
#17. Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
Donald Hall
#18. I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
Irving Layton
#19. To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.
Pattiann Rogers
#21. I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.
Maxine Kumin
#22. Laroche was wrong about that, wrong about men not understanding love.
Anyway, most of the romantic poems and songs and paintings in the world were by men, so what was she talking about?
Josh Lanyon
#23. I wanted his hands at my back and his lips speaking poems on mine and our journey to each other to be completed, the miles between us consumed and all distance closed.
Ally Condie
#24. 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
#25. Creativity is essential to any kind of joyful living. Sometimes I act, sometimes I draw, I paint, I write poems. I can't imagine living without it.
Zephyr Teachout
#26. My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.
Helen Dunmore
#27. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
Wislawa Szymborska
#28. Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs.
Kendrick Lamar
#29. I would fave preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he's left us
Jack Kerouac
#30. I did a load of medicine cabinets a long time ago and I named them after Sex Pistols songs. I suppose I must be getting old if I'm naming work after Philip Larkin poems.
Damien Hirst
#31. I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.
Jane Hirshfield
#33. I knew what my father, more than anything else, wanted me to do. Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had.
James Salter
#34. My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.
Billy Collins
#35. 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
#36. A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem?
Clive James
#38. I didn't write poems for a number of years after graduate school because the criticisms of other students in the workshops wouldn't quiet down in my mind when I tried to work.
Kevin Keck
#39. Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that I didn't love writing and reading. When I was really young, my mother would read poems to me. I loved Edgar Allan Poe - I am sure I didn't understand it, but I loved it.
Alexandra Adornetto
#40. Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.
Janet Fitch
#41. When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.
Langston Hughes
#42. Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
David Whyte
#43. I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
Story Musgrave
#44. Poems are word paintings. Poetry doesn't belong to time. That's why often you feel as if poems are speaking directly to you.
Salil Jha
#45. Being his workmanship doesn't mean we are all poets. It means we are all poems, individual created works of a creative God. And this poetry comes out uniquely through us as we worship, think, love, pray, rest, work, and exist.
Emily P. Freeman
#46. I could write novels about her forever. Maybe when I die I will end up in the poem with her writing more poems about our times together.' The Diary
Jeremy Limn
#47. One of Walt Whitman's best-known poems is this one: When I heard the learn'd astronomer, ... The trouble is, Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul didn't know any better
Isaac Asimov
#48. 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
#49. I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.
Jack Prelutsky
#50. Hmmm. I think a lot of people can write poems that are howls of anguish. I think I've probably written such things and then torn them up.
John Fuller
#51. She's right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling.
Ally Condie
#52. Writers must ... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
Mary Oliver
#53. I uttered his name like a silent whisper of the falling rain - saying love is his game as the cool breeze sets in.- Elizabeth's Shorter Poems
Elizabeth E. Castillo
#54. I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.
Edmund White
#55. 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
#56. Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.
Robert Frost
#57. Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
Adrienne Rich
#58. For if my poems have always been about survival
and I believe they have been
then survival too keeps revealing itself as an art of the unexpected.
Jane Cooper
#59. Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.
Peter Bichsel
#60. Babies are like poems. They're beautiful to their creator, but to other people, they're silly and they're irritating.
Doug Stanhope
#61. I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.
Billy Collins
#62. 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
#63. I've said what I'm prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you're going to tell them a whole lot more.
Wendy Cope
#64. We weave together the many skeins of our words,
Into poems and stories and books,
And the books are made so much more vivacious and colourful,
For all the care that is woven in along with the words.
Bree Verity
#65. The most dazzling aspect of 'Possession' is Ms. Byatt's canny invention of letters, poems and diaries from the 19th century.
Jay Parini
#66. 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
#67. Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them
consciously and unconsciously
your style will develop.
Dorianne Laux
#68. All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.
Hermann Hesse
#69. I don't know if you or I exist, but somewhere there are poems about us.
Linh Dinh
#70. It's a beautiful universe ... wondrous and the more exciting because no one has written plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it.
Samuel R. Delany
#71. Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.
Rae Armantrout
#72. I had sent [the magazine] a batch of poems which they turned down flat. I was furious. Floss [my wife] said, 'If I were the editor of that magazine *I* would turn down what *you* sent.' So *she* picked a batch and they accepted them *all*.
William Carlos Williams
#73. The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.
Paul Celan
#74. 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
#75. Sometimes you completely forget your own works, your own poems, and your own words, but others remember them line by line, word for word! That is the greatest present you can ever have for your works!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#76. The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.
Saki
#77. The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.
Natasha Trethewey
#78. Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue.
Cate Marvin
#79. To write poems, I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.
Nikki Giovanni
#80. I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books.
Tracy K. Smith
#81. I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world.
Matthea Harvey
#82. There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
Roberto Bolano
#83. Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.
Kim Hyesoon
#84. Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [ ... ], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?
Elizabeth Bishop
#85. And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.
Mark Strand
#86. We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality ... the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.
Henry Louis Gates
#87. I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.
Matthea Harvey
#88. Sometimes, when you are in a really constrained situation, it makes you more focused about what you want to say and where you're heading. The most beautiful love poems that were ever written are sonnets, composed in a very constraining form.
Etgar Keret
#89. When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.
C. K. Williams
#90. You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.
Charles Olson
#91. The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among the world's greatest love poems, because they're love poems about love, not about being poems. The poet loves because he loves, not because love exists.
Alvaro De Campos
#92. OMG! I DESIGNED THIS NEW SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM! IT'S CALLED "POETRY" - YOU HAVE TO READ AMY KING'S POEMS TO GET AN INVITE ~
Amy King
#93. I've learned that my readings of others' work often has little connection to their intentions. This doesn't mean that my response is wrong, and it doesn't make the author's views less right. Poets, like their poems, are "hopeful monsters".
Alice Fulton
#94. The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.
Dan Beachy-Quick
#95. Love and memory and thought and dream ~
My favorite poems have never been written in words.
Kij Johnson
#96. I've always thought my poems told stories.
Douglas Dunn
#97. I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.
Jeff Lindsay
#98. My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.
Hayden Carruth
#99. The prose-poems of the Japji envelop us by opening our third eye to the experience of concrete manifestations of nature, the overall circle of light, which shone in the nimbus, which people saw around Nanak's face, lit up by the shimmering glow of the flame which burnt inside him. It
Khushwant Singh
#100. Go tell the Spartans, you who passeth by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie Poems by Simonides (556 BC - 468 BC)
Ian S Varty
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