Quotes About Meaning

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.

In many ways, I feel like the form carries so much of the weight in a poem, obviously. But I think we sometimes forget that.

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

For me, to have had an impact with anything that you've done, whether it's a painting, a photo, a poem, or something that you've created, just that experience is enormous. You don't get that all the time.

I have a favorite poem. From Rudyard Kipling. It's called 'L'Envoi.'

I write short phrases and used to think they were poems!

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.

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.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.

So many poems you go into and come up empty.

There are a lot of poems where I am questing for God. I don't think there is any finding of God.

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.

I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

I do think my lyrics have gotten... not necessarily more poetic, but more open to interpretation; they're less literal.

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.