Poem Quotes

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

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"Still the question remains of what actually speaks in a poem, if not subjectivity as historically constructed"

Thomas Harrison

"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

"The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered"

Peter Davison, Actor

"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

"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

"The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem"

Allen Tate, Poet

"You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words"

Stephane Mallarme, Poet

"Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem"

James Merrill, Poet

"The moment of change is the only poem"

Adrienne Rich, Poet

"What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why"

Allen Tate, Poet

"A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all"

Allen Tate, Poet

"We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate"

Allen Tate, Poet

"There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within"

William Kingdon Clifford, Mathematician

"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

"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

"The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience"

William Gibson, Writer

"The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair"

Jose Bergamin, Writer

"No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer"

Tahar Ben Jelloun, Poet

"A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness"

Hermann Ebbinghaus, Psychologist

"If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?"

Dorothy Fields, Musician

"In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average"

Derek Walcott, Playwright

"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, Educator

"I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law"

Wilfred Owen, Soldier

"A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season"

Wilfred Owen, Soldier

"To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative"

Nicholas Mosley, Novelist

"I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems"

Jim Harrison, Writer

"A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have"

Wallace Stevens, Poet

"No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?"

John Barton, Poet

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

Gore Vidal, Novelist

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