Quotes about poem

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

Quotes about poem

José Baroja photo
Fernando Pessoa photo
Johnny Depp photo
Edgar Allan Poe photo

“Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.”

"The Philosophy of Composition" (published 1846).

“(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

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

Richelle Mead photo
Paul Valéry photo

“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Unsourced

Loreena McKennitt photo

“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.”

Loreena McKennitt (1957) Canadian musician and composer

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.

Oscar Wilde photo
Sylvia Plath photo
J.M.W. Turner photo
Langston Hughes photo
Lawrence Ferlinghetti photo
Sylvia Plath photo

“The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

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

Dylan Thomas photo
Nikki Giovanni photo
Sylvia Plath photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Yasunari Kawabata photo

“A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Source: House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories

Virginia Woolf photo
Joan Miró photo

“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

from: Joan Miro: Selected Writings and Interviews, M.Rowell, Thames and Hudson, 1987
1940 - 1960

Sylvia Plath photo

“Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.

From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Collected Poems

Joyce Kilmer photo

“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.

Nicanor Parra photo

“A poem should improve on the blank page.”

Nicanor Parra (1914–2018) writer, poet, matematician, fisic
Henry Miller photo
Virginia Woolf photo

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

Very often misquoted as "For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
Variant: Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3, p. 51

Merce Cunningham photo
Janet Fitch photo
Ovid photo

“or that writing a poem you can read to no one
is like dancing in the dark.”

Ovid (-43–17 BC) Roman poet

Source: The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

Oscar Wilde photo
Robert Frost photo

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

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

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

Alain de Botton photo
Robert Penn Warren photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Paul Claudel photo

“For things and for poems, there is but one way of being new, and that is to be true; there is only one way of being young, and that is to be eternal.”

Paul Claudel (1868–1955) French diplomat

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.

Vladimir Nabokov photo

“Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss
Poems that take a thousand years to die
But ape the immortality of this
Red label on a little butterfly.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

"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.

Octavio Paz photo

“To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Alternating Current (1967)

George Washington photo
Fernando Pessoa photo

“If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.”

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.

Yukio Mishima photo

“I want to make a poem of my life.”

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) Japanese author

As quoted by Mishima's biographer, Henry Scott-Stokes in the documentary Yukio Mishima : Samurai Writer (1985)

Dafydd ap Gwilym photo

“I have an equal right to make poems as you have to pray, I have the same right to sing for my bread as you to beg for it. Are not hymns and sequences but other kinds of odes and elegiacs? And are not the psalms of David poems to the good God?”

Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) Welsh poet

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.

Huey Long photo
Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben photo
Francois Villon photo
Bashō Matsuo photo

“Sick on a journey,
my dreams wander
the withered fields.
Bashō's last poem, written while he was dying of a stomach illness.”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

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

Carlo Rovelli photo
Henri Barbusse photo
Emil M. Cioran photo

“Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

Edgar Allan Poe photo

“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.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

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.

Tennessee Williams photo

“Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield.”

Jim, Scene Seven
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

Edgar Allan Poe photo
Czeslaw Milosz photo
Thomas Chatterton photo

“The finest of the Rowley poems – Eclogues, Ballad of Charity &c rank absolutely with the finest poetry in the language…He was an absolute and untarnished hero.”

Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) English poet, forger

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

H.P. Lovecraft photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Novalis photo

“The poem of the understanding is philosophy.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

“Logological Fragments,” Philosophical Writings, M. Stolijar, trans. (Albany: 1997) #24

Claude Monet photo
Michael Faraday photo

“I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.”

Michael Faraday (1791–1867) English scientist

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

Thomas Mann photo

“There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else.”

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6; variant translation: I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts! For therein, and in nothing else, lies goodness and love of humankind.

Bertrand Russell photo

“If, when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

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

Kenzaburō Ōe photo

“Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

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.

Joyce Kilmer photo

“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.

Robert Frost photo

“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.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

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.

“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.”

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.

Ryōkan photo

“Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
When you know that my poems are not poems,
Then we can speak of poetry.”

Ryōkan (1758–1831) Japanese Buddhist monk

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)

Kenzaburō Ōe photo

“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.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

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.

Jericho Brown photo

“A poem should go beyond what you already know, and if it’s going to go beyond what you already know, a poem might say something that begins to have you question what side you’re on, which, in turn, might begin to have an audience question what side you’re on…”

Jericho Brown (1976) American writer

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)

Edgar Allan Poe photo

“A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

The Poetic Principle (1850)

Tulsidas photo

“The Ramacharitamanas undoubtedly is the great poem worthy to rank among the great classical masterpieces of world literature.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

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

Kendrick Lamar photo

“If I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it?
I mean I write poems in these songs dedicated to you
When you're in the mood for empathy, there's blood in my pen
Better yet where your friends and them?”

Kendrick Lamar (1987) American rapper, songwriter and record producer from California

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

Paul Valéry photo

“A poem is never finished; it's always an accident that puts a stop to it-that is to say, gives it to the public.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: Unsourced

Margaret Atwood photo
Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo
Sylvia Plath photo

“But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Maria Dahvana Headley photo
Nicholson Baker photo
Arthur Rimbaud photo
Philip Larkin photo
Mary Karr photo
David Bowie photo
William Carlos Williams photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“Mark spoke like a poem and walked like a dance.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Bitter of Tongue

Walt Whitman photo

“Your very flesh shall be a great poem…”

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

Elizabeth Bishop photo
Seamus Heaney photo
Dan Brown photo
John Clare photo

“I found the poems in the fields,
And only wrote them down.”

John Clare (1793–1864) English poet

Source: The Later Poems, 1837-1864: Volumes I and II

Hunter S. Thompson photo

“All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.

Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Source: Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga