Poem Quotes: Inspirational Verses and Lines from Renowned Poets (Page 4)

"Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words"

Northrop Frye, Critic

"The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections"

Hart Crane, Poet

"I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere"

Sharon Olds, Poet

"No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation"

Marguerite Duras, Novelist

"Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented"

Mark Strand, Poet

"Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem"

Paul Celan, Poet

"A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically"

Diane Ackerman, Poet

"However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it"

James Schuyler, Poet

"The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be"

John Ashbery, Poet

"Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space"

Richard Corliss, Writer

"A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances"

Douglas Dunn, Poet

"A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties"

Anne Stevenson, Poet

"No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?"

C. Day Lewis, Poet

"Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaning of a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.'"

Cesare Lombroso, Psychologist

"Every single soul is a poem"

Michael Franti, Musician

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

Douglas Dunn, Poet

"A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem"

Douglas Dunn, Poet

"Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning"

Carol Ann Duffy, Poet

"The poem is the point at which our strength gave out"

Richard Rosen

"Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just"

John Drinkwater, Poet

"The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it"

Hart Crane, Poet

"In one line of his poem he said good fences make good neighbors. I'd like to think that Alaska and British Columbia working together can prove that we can be pretty darned good neighbors without fences"

Dan Miller, Politician

"We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now"

Julie Taymor, Director

"At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar"

Joni Mitchell, Musician

"This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force"

Sharon Olds, Poet

"If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting"

Sharon Olds, Poet

"I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door"

Michael Ondaatje, Author

"Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure"

Mark Strand, Poet

"It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape"

Mark Strand, Poet

"And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem"

Mark Strand, Poet

"Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear"

Thomas Lynch, Politician

"From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose"

Mark Strand, Poet

"To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry"

Laura Riding, Poet

"Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage"

Paul Engle, Poet

"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

"Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem"

Conrad Hall, Artist

"For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic"

James Broughton, Director

"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

"I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem"

James Schuyler, Poet

"My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said"

Laurie Anderson, Musician

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