Top 100 What Is A Poem Quotes
#1. What is a poem, if not a toy mouse viewed from an angle that makes it appear to take over the world? Lee
Nell Zink
#2. For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
#3. The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
Robert Penn Warren
#4. Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.
Basil Bunting
#5. You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.
Robert Frost
#6. The longer a life, the challenge is not the distance between destinations, but the difficulty of travelling light. My soul's a portmanteau packed full, one half filled with what was, the other with what is, what should be.
Jamie A. Hughes
#7. Poetry saves what is human in this world going gaudy & insane. In exploring small truths, something larger might turn up, adding dimension, insight, vision, recognition to our lives. We just might be more complete, more aware after a poem.
Diane Glancy
#8. Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.
Dana Gioia
#9. Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.
Henry David Thoreau
#10. That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.
Li-Young Lee
#11. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.
Billy Collins
#12. End rhymes are not enough. Every word-sound in a poem should find an echo in another, neighbouring word's sound to achieve what Ezra Pound called melopoeia. (This is something like what the Welsh call Cynghanned.)
Anne Stevens
#13. Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
Marilyn Hacker
#14. What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.
Ian McEwan
#15. What's interesting about songs where the writer is genuinely in love with words is that it's easy to read the lyrics like a poem.
Ann Reed
#16. There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is the most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.
Robert Frost
#17. I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized ... A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.
William Carlos Williams
#18. For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.
Baltasar Kormakur
#19. To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing.
Sam Shepard
#20. There is a line from the Marina Tsvetaeva poem I'm so fond of: "In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews." What she means is that writers and artists are outside the normal flow of daily life, the normal flow of society in general.
Paul Auster
#21. And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.
Edward Hirsch
#22. A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.
Hayden Carruth
#23. Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries ...
Juan Felipe Herrera
#24. There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
Alan W. Watts
#25. 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
#27. 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
#28. you'll find the buildings taller, that
the halls are full of ghosts
but everything still here is
what you remember most
Savannah Brown
#29. What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition.
Pattiann Rogers
#30. Some say; "Poetry is what gets lost in translation!"
In this sense, my life is a bitter poem. But that is the force of nature.
I already changed it to my alternative order: "Poetry must find ways of breaking distance.
Fereidoon Yazdi
#31. Bob's Words:
Nobody knows what tomorrow brings
By loving, giving, caring
And sharing today
Lets one know that if tomorrow
Does not come
Today is a good day to be the last
Greg Noack
#32. What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
T. S. Eliot
#33. Ladies, when you write a poem for Feminism because that is what we sometimes do, remember that it's never about them. It's only about you.
Danielle Valenilla
#34. A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.
Alice McDermott
#35. I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum - the poem finds a reason for continuing.
Billy Collins
#36. Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.
Kate Braverman
#37. First is a poem, a ballad, out of Scotland. You may say there is no king in it, and of course there isn't, which is what makes it so sad. The last line of the third verse, 'O he might hae been a king' is so sad that I don't like to look at it with both eyes at once.
William Mayne
#38. For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
Walter Benjamin
#39. What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed. Such
Leo Tolstoy
#40. It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it's what a poem does with its eyes.
Mary Ruefle
#41. In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.
James Schuyler
#42. Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
Billy Collins
#43. Six Lines
I know that in this world no one needs me,
me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard
Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?
Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty
and only the ephemeral is godly
and humility is the only true rebellion
Aaron Zeitlin
#44. I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.
Joseph Campbell
#45. Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.
Sylvia Plath
#46. What else is a poem about?
The rhythm and the images buried in the language. All the ways you can build an emotion with words, but you can't just write 'I feel sad.' I mean, you can, but it's not poetry ... I think it has to be experienced instead of studied. You step into it.
Garret Freymann-Weyr
#47. Poetry is another name for a person's telling of the self, existence and what is beyond, and one's own perceptions.
M. Fethullah Gulen
#48. The poem 'What Teachers Make' is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: 'Gee, Mr. Mali. You don't possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?' And that was the first time I'd ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I'm sure I have a teacher-God complex.
Taylor Mali
#49. When you read the poem, you wonder, what might Grendel have been? Could it have been a person that was turned away? Someone that was disfigured or deformed? Like everything else did, it came from somewhere. It's really exciting, and not knowing is part of the magic and mystery.
Kieran Bew
#50. About your easy heads my prayers
I said with syllables of clay.
What gift, I asked, shall I bring now
Before I weep and walk away?
Take, they replied, the oak and laurel.
Take our fortune of tears and live
Like a spendthrift lover. All we ask
Is the one gift you cannot give.
Tana French
#51. There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
Henry David Thoreau
#52. When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.
Andrew Motion
#53. You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the
poet's consciousness in his best moods.
George Eliot
#54. Neruda poem that talked about 'the light of hidden flowers.' It's easy to believe in people when they have it all together on the outside. It's way cooler to believe in them when what they have is still a little buried.
Jennifer Handford
#55. From time to time, i think of him watching me
from over the top of his glasses, or eating candy
from a jar. i remember thanking him each time
the session was done. but mostly what i see
is a human hand reaching down to lift
a pebble from my tongue
Tracy K. Smith
#56. It is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is.
I. A. Richards
#57. Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem.
Howard S. Becker
#58. But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.
Jane Campion
#59. 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
#61. What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.
Harold Bloom
#62. 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
#63. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.
Jane Hirshfield
#64. When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car
See me.
Randall Jarrell
#65. Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#66. A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.
J. D. McClatchy
#67. What is the point of teaching how to analyse a poem or a piece of Shakespeare but not to analyse the Internet?
Beeban Kidron
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.
Paul Muldoon
#71. But it's your Oracle," I protested. "Can't you tell us what the prophecy means?"
Apollo sighed. "You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search.
Rick Riordan
#72. A poem often begins in the midst of wonderful wandering thoughts that are eager to open wings to fly in the beautiful blue sky of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#73. Do not listen to what any society tells you about the body - the body is the metaphor for all experience. A woman's body more than any other. Like language, its beautiful but weaker sister. Look at this poem. This painting. Look at these photographs. The body doesn't lie.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#74. 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
#75. To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative.
Nicholas Mosley
#76. A well crafted life is like a good poem. What is left out tells others every bit as much about you as what is added in.
Eric Vance Walton
#77. Usually, a number of events will be going on around me to start me on a book. What I mean is, I will have read a poem or seen a picture that is lingering in my mind.
Chris Raschka
#78. The Ideal
This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.
A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.
This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.
James Fenton
#79. It is dishonest to give me a poem and pretend to want my opinion when what you really want are reasons to live.
Deborah Levy
#80. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.
Denise Levertov
#81. Each story, novel, poem and play presents a vision of the world that illuminates the dark cave of life we stumble through. We can see better where we're going, what sudden drop to avoid, where the cool water is running.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#82. Sometimes it's like that. I go, 'You know what? I'm going to just change scales. I'm going to even change instruments. And I'm going to go into the chromatics of the Spanish language,' and I do. You know, the poem is totally different. It's like a lunar voice versus a day voice, a solar voice.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#83. I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
A.R. Ammons
#84. My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,
but what I reject is more numerous,
denser, more demanding than before.
A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable loss.
Wislawa Szymborska
#85. 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
#86. Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
James Laughlin
#87. What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
Octavio Paz
#88. Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, 'Oh, that's what this is all about,' and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.
Sarah Kay
#89. Every soul needs a touch of erotic love. A deep, unconditional love is what every heart truly desires. True love is passionately erotic.
Salil Jha
#90. A poem is a painting with imagery and words; a painting is a poem of color on a reflecting mirror.
Debasish Mridha
#91. I do feel like no matter what you're doing, whether it's music or writing a play or a poem or drawing a picture or painting something, that you're speaking to what is it you want to express, what is it you want to see.
J.J. Abrams
#92. Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling ... A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually-that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too- but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
#93. A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you ... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
Adrienne Rich
#94. What distinguishes a mathematical model from, say, a poem, a song, a portrait or any other kind of "model," is that the mathematical model is an image or picture of reality painted with logical symbols instead of with words, sounds or watercolors.
John L. Casti
#95. there are only so many things
that you can fix with your hands.
...What they don't realize is I am not a thing to fix.
Danabelle Gutierrez
#96. A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text.
Louise Rosenblatt
#97. ..the poem is made of sequences in which images, figures of speech and rhythm are undivided. One needs to enter this 'undivision'", and what it does, the proposition it issues, in both senses of the word, logical and erotic: "Let us call a sentence a proposition. A poem makes propositions
Michel Deguy
#98. What I love about drafts is the experimental nature of them. The draft is what you know about writing a poem running up against what you don't know about the subject. If you're lucky, you get to surprise yourself.
Cornelius Eady
#99. The poet must work with brush and paper,but this is not what makes the poem. A man does not go in search of a poem - the poem comes in search of him.
Yang Wanli
#100. what is a journey
without someone who wanders
if sometimes a pair
is made of two
Lori Jenessa Nelson
