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"

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

Paul Nurse, Scientist

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

Robert Penn Warren, Novelist

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

Rita Dove, 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

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

Groucho Marx, Comedian

"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

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

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poet

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

Steven Wright, Comedian

"Every old poem is sacred"

Horace, Poet

"A picture is a poem without words"

Horace, Poet

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

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

"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

"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

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned"

Paul Valery, Poet

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 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

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

Bob Dylan, Musician

"A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it"

John Millington Synge, 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

"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

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

Carl Sandburg, Poet

"Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important"

James Laughlin, Poet

"With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said"

James Laughlin, Poet

"A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense"

Thomas Harrison

"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

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