Quotes about poem
A collection of quotes on the topic of poem, writing, likeness, poetry.
Quotes about poem

“I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”

“If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul; you haven't experienced poetry.”

“Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.”
"The Philosophy of Composition" (published 1846).
Variant: Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
Source: Thirst

“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”
Unsourced

“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Source: The Waves

Notes from McKennitt's journals in the CD booklet for The Mask and Mirror '
Context: May, 1993 - Stratford... have been reading through the poetry of 15th century Spain, and I find myself drawn to one by the mystic writer and visionary St. John of the Cross; the untitled work is an exquisite, richly metaphoric love poem between himself and his god. It could pass as a love poem between any two at any time... His approach seems more akin to early Islamic or Judaic works in its more direct route to communication to his god... I have gone over three different translations of the poem, and am struck by how much a translation can alter our interpretation. I am reminded that most holy scriptures come to us in translation, resulting in a diversity of views.

Source: J.M.W. Turner

Source: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts

Source: House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories

“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”
from: Joan Miro: Selected Writings and Interviews, M.Rowell, Thames and Hudson, 1987
1940 - 1960

“Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962”
Source: The Collected Poems

“I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.”

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

“I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.”
"Trees" - This poem was first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Vol. 2 (August 1913). The first two lines were first written down on the 2nd of February 1913.
Trees and Other Poems (1914)
Source: Trees & Other Poems
Context: I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

“A poem should improve on the blank page.”

“or that writing a poem you can read to no one
is like dancing in the dark.”
Source: The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
Variant: A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Lecture, "The Themes of Robert Frost" (1947)

Il n'y a pour les choses et pour les poèmes qu'une seule manière d'être nouveaux, c'est d'être vrais et qu'une seule manière d'être jeunes, c'est d'être éternels.
Positions et propositions (Paris: Gallimard, 1928) p. 16; John O'Connor (trans.) Ways and Crossways (London: Sheed & Ward, 1935) p. 49.

"A Discovery" (December 1941); published as "On Discovering a Butterfly" in The New Yorker (15 May 1943); also in Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000) Edited and annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, p. 274.

“To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.”
Alternating Current (1967)

1770s, Letter to Phyllis Wheatley (1776)

English note by the hand of the poet in the same paper sheet: Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
Ibid., p. 229
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Se um homem escreve bem só quando está bêbado dir-lhe-ei: embebede-se- E se ele me disser que o seu fígado sofre com isso, respondo: o que é o seu fígado? É uma coisa morta que vive enquanto você vive, e os poemas que escrever vivem sem enquanto.

“I want to make a poem of my life.”
As quoted by Mishima's biographer, Henry Scott-Stokes in the documentary Yukio Mishima : Samurai Writer (1985)

Cyn rheitied i mi brydu
Ag i tithau bregethu,
A chyn iawned ym glera
Ag I tithau gardota.
Pand englynion ac odlau
Yw'r hymnau a'r segwensiau?
A chywyddau i Dduw lwyd
Yw sallwyr Dafydd Broffwyd.
"Y Bardd a'r Brawd Llwyd" (The Poet and the Grey Brother), line 53; translation from Dafydd ap Gwilym (trans. Nigel Heseltine) Twenty-Five Poems (Banbury: The Piers Press, 1968) p. 42.

Speech given during the 1928 gubernatorial election; quoted in Hugh Davis Graham, Huey Long (1970), p. 40.
The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838)

Robert Louis Stevenson Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882), ch. 6.
Criticism
Source: Restoring Pride: The Lost Virtue of Our Age (1995), p. 64

Sick on a journey –
over parched fields
dreams wander on.
Basho, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London, 1985, p. 81 (Translation: Lucien Stryk)
Travelling, sick
My dreams roam
On a withered moor.
(Unknown translator)
Individual poems

“Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.”
Drawn and Quartered (1983)

The Poetic Principle (1850)
Context: I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length.

“Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield.”
Jim, Scene Seven
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

The Poetic Principle (1850)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, letter to Hall Caine dated June 13, 1880; published in Vivien Allen (ed.) Dear Mr. Rossetti (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000) p. 122.
Criticism

"He" - Written 11 August 1925; first published in Weird Tales, Vol. 8, No. 3 (September 1926)
Fiction

“The poem of the understanding is philosophy.”
“Logological Fragments,” Philosophical Writings, M. Stolijar, trans. (Albany: 1997) #24

in his letter, 15 February 1889, (L. 911); as cited in Steven Z. Levine, Claude Monet (1994), Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self. p. 93
1870 - 1890

Lecture notes of 1858, quoted in The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870) by Bence Jones, Vol. 2, p. 403

"The Doctrine of Free Will"
1930s, Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? (1930)

“Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth.”
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
Context: Under that title Kawabata talked about a unique kind of mysticism which is found not only in Japanese thought but also more widely Oriental thought. By 'unique' I mean here a tendency towards Zen Buddhism. Even as a twentieth-century writer Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks. Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth. According to such poems words are confined within their closed shells. The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words.

“Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.”
"Trees" - This poem was first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Vol. 2 (August 1913). The first two lines were first written down on the 2nd of February 1913.
Trees and Other Poems (1914)
Context: I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

The portion of "The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom." is often misquoted as: Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Context: It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: “The person often experiences this instability of self-image as chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom.” My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous. A partial list follows. I could not and did not want to: ski, play tennis, or go to gym class; attend to any subject in school other than English and biology; write papers on any assigned topics (I wrote poems instead of papers for English; I got F’s); plan to go or apply to college; give any reasonable explanation for these refusals.

Variant translation:
Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
After you know my poems are not poems,
Then we can begin to discuss poetry!
"Zen Poetics of Ryokan" in Simply Haiku: A Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry (Summer 2006) http://www.hermitary.com/articles/ryokan_poetics.html
Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf : Zen Poems of Ryokan (1993)

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
Context: Under that title Kawabata talked about a unique kind of mysticism which is found not only in Japanese thought but also more widely Oriental thought. By 'unique' I mean here a tendency towards Zen Buddhism. Even as a twentieth-century writer Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks. Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth. According to such poems words are confined within their closed shells. The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words.

On how social and political crises are seeping into American poetry in “JERICHO BROWN in conversation with MICHAEL DUMANIS” http://www.benningtonreview.org/jericho-brown-interview in Bennington Review (2018 Oct 27)

“A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.”
The Poetic Principle (1850)

Source: On Tulsidas’s epic Ramacharritamanas, P.E.Keay in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", p. 35

Poetic Justice.
Source: Song lyrics, good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012)

“But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Source: A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.”

“Mark spoke like a poem and walked like a dance.”
Source: Bitter of Tongue

“Your very flesh shall be a great poem…”
Variant: And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Source: Leaves of Grass

“I found the poems in the fields,
And only wrote them down.”
Source: The Later Poems, 1837-1864: Volumes I and II

“All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.
Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem”
Source: Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga