Quotes about poem

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

Quotes about poem

“Suddenly, as the sun rose, the poem flew without an owner, while he faded away like a fiction called a “story.””

José Baroja book Un hijo de perra y otros cuentos

Sun

“Who today asks your poem where the country is going?”

José Baroja book Mi último invierno

Country

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

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Love

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Life, Art, Music, Way

“She's kind of a walking poem, she's this perfect beauty… but at the same time very deep, very smart.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

Beauty, Time, Perfection

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

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

Soul

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

Edgar Allan Poe book The Philosophy of Composition

"The Philosophy of Composition" (published 1846).

Beauty

“(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

Love, Dreams, Understanding, Sleep

“Rose once told me about this poem she’d read. There was this line, ‘If your eyes weren’t open, you wouldn’t know the difference between dreaming and waking.’ You know what I’m afraid of? That someday, even with my eyes open, I still won’t know.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Dreams, Reading

“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”

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

Unsourced

“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

Thinking

“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.

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

“J. M. W. Turner's Poem dedicated to Ivan Aivazovsky (1842)

Like a curtain slowly drawn
It stops suddenly half open,
Or, like grief itself, filled with gentle hope,
It becomes lighter in the shore-less dark,
Thus the moon barely wanes
Winding her way above the storm-tossed sea.
Stand upon this hill and behold endlessly
This scene of a formidable sea,
And it will seem to thee a waking dream.
That secret mind flowing in thee
Which even the day cannot scatter,
The serenity of thinking and the beating of the heart
Will enchain thee in this vision;
This golden-silver moon
Standing lonely over the sea,
All curtain the grief of even the hopeless.
And it appears that through the tempest
Moves a light caressing wind,
While the sea swells up with a roar,
Sometimes, like a battlefield it looks to me
The tempestuous sea,
Where the moon itself is a brilliant golden crown
Of a great king.
But even that moon is always beneath thee
Oh Master most high,
Oh forgive thou me
If even this master was frightened for a moment
Oh, noble moment, by art betrayed…
And how may one not delight in thee,
Oh thou young boy, but forgive thou me,
If I shall bend my white head
Before thy art divine
Thy bliss-wrought genius…”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Source: J.M.W. Turner

Secret, Dreams, Hope, Art

“I loved my friend
He went away from me
There's nothing more to say
The poem ends,
Soft as it began-
I loved my friend.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

Love

“The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

Art, Communication, Failure, Painting

“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

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

World, Knowledge, Reality, Universe

“He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

Books

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

--From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962”

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

Source: The Collected Poems

Fear

“At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Feeling, Loss, Reading

“He's probably their battle poet, too."
"You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?"
"No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy…. When a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode.”

Terry Pratchett book The Wee Free Men

Source: The Wee Free Men

Training

“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

Dogs, Night

“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Beauty, Dreams

“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

Music, Color

“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

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

Robert Frank (1924–2019) American photographer and filmmaker

People, Way, Feeling, Reading

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

Jaime Gil de Biedma (1929–1990) Spanish poet

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

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Spring, Heart

“I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.”

Joyce Kilmer Trees and Other Poems

"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.

Love, Thinking, Tree

“A poem should improve on the blank page.”

Nicanor Parra (1914–2018) writer, poet, matematician, fisic

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Source: Wisdom of the Heart

Life, God, World, Singing

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

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

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

For women

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) American dancer

Love, Feeling, Dance, Painting

“You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Age, Beauty, Boy, Lovers

“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

Reading, Dance

“Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“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.

Sense

“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”

Alain de Botton book The Architecture of Happiness

Source: The Architecture of Happiness

Books, Feeling, Confidence, Painting

“The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

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

“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Palm Sunday

The People One Knows
Palm Sunday (1981)

Rage, Personality

“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.

Way

“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.

Kiss

“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)

Reading

“I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant Lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical Talents. In honour of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the Poem, had I not been apprehensive, that, while I only meant to give the World this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of Vanity. This and nothing else, determined me not to give it place in the public Prints.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

1770s, Letter to Phyllis Wheatley (1776)

World, Sincerity

“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.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

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.

Suffering, Dead

“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)

Life

“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.

God, Singing

“And it is here under this oak where Evangeline waited for her lover, Gabriel, who never came. This oak is an immortal spot, made so by Longfellow's poem, but Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment.
Where are the schools that you have waited for your children to have, that have never come? Where are the roads and the highways that you send your money to build, that are no nearer now than ever before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and disabled? Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but it lasted through only one lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations. Give me the chance to dry the eyes of those who still weep here!”

Huey Long (1893–1935) American politician, Governor of Louisiana, and United States Senator

Speech given during the 1928 gubernatorial election; quoted in Hugh Davis Graham, Huey Long (1970), p. 40.

Money, Children, School, Disappointment

“It has been well remarked of the poems of Hafiz, that their refreshing influence does not depend so much on the sense of the words as on the tone of mind produced in the reader.”

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher

The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838)

Sense, Dependency

“The Large Testament is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's Don Juan and the racy humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter writer – except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from no other language known to me – he bears a particular resemblance.”

Francois Villon (1431–1463) Mediæval French poet

Robert Louis Stevenson Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882), ch. 6.
Criticism

Life, World, Soul, Idea

“Instead of supposing that a work of art must be something that all can behold—a poem, a painting, a book, a great building—consider making your own life a work of art. You have yourself to begin with, and a time of uncertain duration to work on it. You do not have to be what you are, and even though you may be quite content with who you are, it will not be hard for you to think of something much greater that you might become. It need not be something spectacular or even something that will attract notice from others. What it will be is a kind of excellence that you project for yourself, and then attain—something that you can take a look at, with honest self-appraisal, and be proud of.”

Richard Taylor (philosopher) (1919–2003) American philosopher, born 1919

Source: Restoring Pride: The Lost Virtue of Our Age (1995), p. 64

Life, Books, Art, Thinking

“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

Dreams

“Listening to a cultivated person of today who jokes and almost boasts of his scientific ignorance is as sad as listening to a scientist who boasts of not having read any poem.”

Carlo Rovelli (1956) Italian physicist

Il Sole 24 Ore cultural supplement, October 17, 2010.

Sadness, Reading, Personality

“Perhaps because of my fever, perhaps because of my lofty pain, I imagine that some one there is declaiming a great poem, that some one is speaking of Prometheus. He has stolen light from the gods. In his entrails he feels the pain, always beginning again, always fresh, gathering from evening to evening, when the vulture steals to him as it would steal to its nest. And you feel that we are all like Prometheus because of desire, but there is neither vulture nor gods.
There is no paradise except that which we create in the great tomb of the churches. There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of living.
There is no mysterious fire. I have stolen the truth. I have stolen the whole truth. I have seen sacred things, tragic things, pure things, and I was right. I have seen shameful things, and I was right. And so I have entered the kingdom of truth, if, while preserving respect to truth and without soiling it, we can use the expression that deceit and religious blasphemy employ.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVII

God, Pain, Truth, Feeling

“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)

God

“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.

Soul

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

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Jim, Scene Seven
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

Light

“There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified — more supremely noble than this very poem — this poem per se — this poem which is a poem and nothing more — this poem written solely for the poem's sake.”

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

The Poetic Principle (1850)

“What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Ars Poetica?"

Hope, Evil

“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

“Instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before — the unwhisperable secret of secrets — The fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.”

H.P. Lovecraft book He

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

Life, Truth, Secret, Fear

“Thoughts in a poem. The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

1.189
Human, All Too Human (1878)

“The poem of the understanding is philosophy.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

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

Understanding

“I was completely ignorant of the poetry of Poe; it is admirable, it is poetry itself, the dream, and how one feels that you have translated its soul! I am no more than a completely illiterate ignoramus, but am not any the less moved by it. I knew only Poe's prose, which I had read and admired very young before I had heard it spoken of, but how your poems complete and express the man he was”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

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

Dreams, Feeling, Soul, Reading

“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

Thinking

“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.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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.

Love, Death, Dreams

“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)

“The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

The Independent on Sunday June 24, 1990.

“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.

Truth

“Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.”

Joyce Kilmer Trees and Other Poems

"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.

God, Fools, Tree

“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.

Love, Life, Wisdom, Pleasure

“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.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

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.

School

“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)

“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

Feeling, Understanding

“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)

Question

“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)

Soul