Quotes about poem
page 2

“There is dew
on these poems in the morning,
and at night a cool breeze may rise from them.

In the winter they are blankets, in the summer a place to swim.

I like talking to you like this. Have you moved
a step closer?

Soon we may be
kissing.”

Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet

Kiss, Winter, Summer, Night

“Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

World

“Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others…
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

From the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass
Context: This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . .
Context: This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.... The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured.... others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches.... and shall master all attachment.

Love, Stupidity, Sun, Animals

“the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople… you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: 100 Selected Poems

“Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true
"Poem on His Birthday”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Way, Birthday, Light

“No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Books, Reading

“Unfinished Poem
I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Love

“Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

--From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954”

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

Source: The Collected Poems

Travel, Sun

“A living poem" had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

“When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

Tree

“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”

John Fowles book The French Lieutenant's Woman

Source: The French Lieutenant's Woman

“The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Source: The Collected Poems

Intelligence

“He stepped back and threw his arms out.
"I'm always crazy around you Rose. Here, I'm going to write an impromptu poem for you."
He tipped his head back and shouted to the sky:
"Rose is in red
But never in blue
Sharp as a thorn
Fights like one too.”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

Fight

“You write poems
because you need
a place
where what isn’t may be”

Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) Argentinian poet

“A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Letter to Louis Untermeyer (1 January 1916)
1910s

Sense, Effort

“No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book, or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.”

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) French writer and film director

Alcohol, Books, Music, Painting

“Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Suicide

“I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Women, Thinking

“One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.”

Jane Hirshfield (1953) Poet

Source: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Reading

“You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

Girl

“If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.”

David Carradine (1936–2009) American actor and martial artist

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

Source: Nothing Twice: Selected Poems

“I have bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea…
Devouring the green azures.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Je me suis baigné dans le Poème De la Mer... Dévorant les azurs verts. St. 6 Le Bateau Ivre http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Boat.html (The Drunken Boat) (1871)

Sea

“Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women

People

“in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: Selected Poems

Night

“The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Thinking, Tree, Change, Cute

“I believe everyone has this fuckin' poem in his heart.”

Bill Hicks book Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines

Source: Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines

Heart

“The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Beauty, Sex, Feeling

“There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Variant: There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
Source: The Savage Detectives

Time

“Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Star, Tear

“Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.”

Ann Beattie (1947) Short story writer, novelist, professor

Source: Walks with Men

Love

“The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn't get written because someone knocked on the door.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Love, Life, Marriage, Problem

“There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.”

Jeffrey McDaniel (1967) American writer

Women

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

1950-07-06
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Source: Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

Dreams

“Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Books

“The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things, she decided, wondering how many writers and philosophers had said this before her, the trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.”

Barbara Pym book Less than Angels

Less than Angels (1955), chapter 9

Life, Pleasure, Sadness, Home

“a poem is a naked person... some people say that I am a poet”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Liner notes http://bobdylan.com/linernotes/bringing.html, Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

People, Personality

“She was not a poet. She was a poem.”

Deborah Levy book Swimming Home

Source: Swimming Home

“No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Study, Learning, Reading, Personality

“If I wasn't writing poems, I'd be washing my hands all the time.”

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

Time

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”

Booker T. Washington book Up from Slavery

Chapter XIV: The Atlanta Exposition Address http://books.google.com/books?id=xN45ZsUMgKEC&q=%22No+race+can+prosper+till+it+learns+that+there+is+as+much+dignity+in+tilling+a+field+as+in+writing+a+poem+It+is+at+the+bottom+of+life+we+must+begin+and+not+at+the+top%22&pg=PA220#v=onepage 1900s, Up From Slavery (1901) Context: No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.

Learning

“I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.

--From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song”

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

Love, Way, Girl, Madness

“Shaw… has a woman ever asked you to write a poem for her?"
"Good God, no," Gideon replied with a snicker. "Shaws don't write poetry. They pay others to write it for them and then take the credit for it.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Again the Magic

God

“Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't…. 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 have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring - I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house.”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

Housing

“Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“I sit in my tree
I sing like the birds
My beak is my pen
My songs are my poems.”

David Almond book My Name Is Mina

Source: My Name Is Mina

Bird, Tree, Singing

“A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Grown-up

Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Source: The Selected Poetry

Past

“Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all theof that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.”

Louis Aragon (1897–1982) French poet, novelist and editor

Source: Treatise on Style

Men, Beauty, Reading, Night

“Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Written on the Body

“The Beautiful Poem"

I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking
about you.

Pissing a few moments ago
I looked down at my penis
affectionately.

Knowing it has been inside
you twice today makes me
feel beautiful.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Source: The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster

Beauty, Angels, Feeling, Thinking

“It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

“This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Suffering

“A poem by Margot Bickel

A little peace
within the last hours of the almost bygone day
a little silence
between the days
so that the nascent yesterday does not get in the past
and tomorrow is lived for today”

Margot Bickel (1958) German poet

Peace, Silence, Past

“It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

World

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Marriage Plot

Source: The Marriage Plot

“Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Study, Grass

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Dreams, Hope, Feeling, Spring

“A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Sense

“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Context: Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

“There is nothing we should be quite so grateful for as the last line of the poem that goes, 'When your own heart asks.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Source: Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

Heart

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

Henry, Act II, scene V
Source: The Real Thing (1982)

Children, World, Thinking, Dead

“Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.”

Kim Addonizio (1954) Poet, novelist

Source: Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

People, Reading

“Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable… The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.”

Marie Howe (1950) American writer

Silence

“I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.”

Raymond Chandler book The High Window

Source: The High Window (1942), chapter 36
Context: When I left, Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie-crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty until her mother came into the space with a broad homely smile on her face to watch me drive away.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

Feeling, Housing

“Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.”

Andrew Motion (1952) poet, novelist and biographer from England

Heart, Forgetting

“I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.”

Spike Milligan (1918–2002) British-Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor

Spike Milligan with Jeremy Taylor Live at Cambridge University. Recorded at Cambridge University on December 2, 1973, this was previously released as a double LP, and later re-issued as a 2 CD set. Milligan used variations on the Shakespear line throughout his later life.

Reading

“A poem is like a score for the human voice.”

Li-Young Lee (1957) American writer

“I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.”

Karen Joy Fowler The Jane Austen Book Club

Source: The Jane Austen Book Club

Boy

“That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though.”

Jane Green (1968) British writer

Source: Straight Talking

Love, Life, People, Parting

“Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.”

Theodore Roszak (1933–2011) American social historian, social critic, writer

Source: Where the Wasteland Ends

Nature

“Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.”

Anne Michaels book Fugitive Pieces

Source: Fugitive Pieces

Kiss, Reading

“If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Pleasure

“When I first read the dictionary, I thought it was a long poem about everything.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

I Have A Pony (1985)

Reading

“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 thorough the search.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Art, Search

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.”

Gilda Radner (1946–1989) American comedian

Way, Learning, Perfection

“You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.”

John Berryman (1914–1972) American poet

Courage

“To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—
True Poems flee”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Lie, Books, Summer

“Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”

Matt Haig book Reasons to Stay Alive

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

Beauty

“He found himself wanting to write poetry about how her blue eyes were like starlight and her hair like night, because "night" and "starlight" rhymed, but he had a feeling the poem wouldn't turn out that well…”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Feeling, Night

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Variant: Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Source: A Poetry Handbook

Life

“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Love, Women, Men

“Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-haired child.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Birth

“You will have a story in there… or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it, you will write it. Word after word after word after word.”

Patricia MacLachlan (1938) American writer of children's books

Source: Word After Word After Word

Time

“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 book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

World, Soul, Learning, Water

“I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

Love, Thinking

“All girls should have a poem
written for them even if
we have to turn this God-damn world
upside down to do it.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

God, World, Girl

“Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.”

Dorianne Laux (1952) American poet

Source: The Poet's Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry

Way

“The moment of change is the only poem.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Change, Powerful

“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 (1874–1963) American poet

“Atque in pepetuum, frater, ave atque vale,” he whispered. The words of the poem had never seemed so fitting: Forever and ever, my brother, hail and farewell.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

“People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

From the poem "Sheep in Fog", 2 December 1962, 28 January 1963”

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

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

People, Disappointment, Star

“Every word was once a poem.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“That girl will rain destruction down on you and your ship. She is an albatross, Captain.

Way I remember it, albatross was a ship's good luck, 'til some idiot killed it. (to Inara) Yes, I've read a poem. Try not to faint.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Way, Girl, Reading

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack”

William Carlos Williams book Journey to Love

'of what is found there.'
Journey to Love (1955), Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
Source: Asphodel, That Greeny Flower and Other Love Poems: That Greeny Flower

Men

“I am too pure for you or anyone.

From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962”

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

Source: The Collected Poems

“I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

God

Quotes about poem page 2

Quotes about poem
page 2