Poem Quotes: Inspirational Verses and Lines from Renowned Poets

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

David Carradine, Actor

"Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city"

Anatole Broyard, Critic

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

Robert Indiana, Artist

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

Octavio Paz, Poet

"Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem"

Paul Nurse, Scientist

"For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard"

Rita Dove, Poet

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

Steven Wright, Comedian

"With the question of the effect of a poem, the topic of investigation shifts from that of textual autonomy to textual reception - to the issue of what we actually look for or find in reading a poem"

Thomas Harrison

"Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise"

Douglas Dunn, Poet

"A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire"

Adrienne Rich, Poet

"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

"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

"When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!"

Kenneth Koch, 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 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

"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

"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

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

Groucho Marx, Comedian

"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem"

Walt Whitman, Poet

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

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

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

"There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem"

Gore Vidal, Novelist

"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

"The moment of change is the only poem"

Adrienne Rich, Poet

"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

"For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography"

Robert Penn Warren, Novelist

"The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life"

Robert Penn Warren, Novelist

"What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"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

"The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital"

George Steiner, Critic