Poem Quotes: Inspirational Verses and Lines from Renowned Poets

"If you cannot be a poet, be the poem"

"To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears"

"I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza"

"I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem"

Allen Tate, Poet

"Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative"

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

"The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise"

Robert Fitzgerald, Author

"The point of an experiment is not to arrive at a predetermined end point, to prove or disprove anything, but to deliver a poem that reveals much about the process taken"

John Barton, Poet

"Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them"

Henry David Thoreau, Author

"The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... 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"

Robert Frost, Poet

"A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom"

Robert Frost, Poet

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness"

Robert Frost, Poet

"My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something"

Groucho Marx, Comedian

"Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poet

"Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

"I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything"

Steven Wright, Comedian

"Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

"A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

"Every old poem is sacred"

Horace, Poet

"A picture is a poem without words"

Horace, Poet

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned"

Paul Valery, Poet

"A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself"

E. M. Forster, Novelist

"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem"

Walt Whitman, Poet

"And your very flesh shall be a great poem"

Walt Whitman, Poet

"History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

"Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem"

Howard Nemerov, 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, Poet

"One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way"

Paul Muldoon, Poet

"Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up"

Paul Muldoon, Poet

"Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer"

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Writer

"Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music"

Carly Simon, Musician

"Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

"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, Comedian

"It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet"

Bob Dylan, Musician

"The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years"

Jean M. Auel, Writer

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