Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
I can't tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand?
They're very different things, a poem and a song, you wouldn't think they would be, but they are.
Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.
I don't think anybody is a poet 24/7, only in those rare moments when a person is producing a poem.
Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.
I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem.
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.
Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.
The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.
A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea.
I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.
A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
The name Phenomenal Woman was inspired by Maya Angelo, who wrote 'Phenomenal Woman', a favorite poem of mine.
I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.
A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?
I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.
What is the point of teaching how to analyse a poem or a piece of Shakespeare but not to analyse the Internet?
A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.
I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best.
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south.
To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.
When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.
I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist.
All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
The first time I got onstage was when I was about 5 years old. It was at a church social, and I had a poem to recite.