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Quotes About Poem

The poem says you only think you're alive but about to be born your radioactive heliographs mock the moon's tongue." — Philip Lamantia, "Fin Del Mundo
~ Philip Lamantia
the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come. — Excerpt from the poem "The Mercy
~ Philip Levine
'Two Voices,' from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.'
~ Brian Eno
Rage is properly the title of Homer's poem, and his audience may have known it by that name, not Iliad .
~ Jonathan Shay
El poema gana si adivinamos que es la manifestación de un anhelo, no la historia de un hecho.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.
~ Joseph Brodsky
A rhyme turns an idea into a law; and, in a sense, each poem is a linguistic codex.
~ Joseph Brodsky
The poet Yeats felt we were living in the last of a great Christian cycle. His poem "The Second Coming" says, "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
~ Joseph Campbell
CAMPBELL: I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.
~ Joseph Campbell
Six Lines I know that in this world no one needs me, me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish? Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty and only the ephemeral is godly and humility is the only true rebellion
~ Aaron Zeitlin
friend: "I am now at work on a poem of life among the gentry, in the style of Hermann and
~ Adam Mickiewicz
Homer then has the bard—a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means "popular with the people"—say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: "The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter." The song, this poem, this story, is the divine
~ Adam Nicolson
Homer then has the bard—a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means "popular with the people"—say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: "The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter." The song, this poem, this story, is the divine purpose of the war. The war happened so that the poem could happen.
~ Adam Nicolson
A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.
~ Adrienne Rich
There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.
~ Adrienne Rich
I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.
~ Adrienne Rich
And the melody remains the ladder of elevation to the poem and the love that adores it.
~ Prof.Salam Al Shereida
There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable. I asked her whether she lived in Manchester, and she said no, she had just been up there to teach another course, and had had to fly straight from there to here.
~ Rachel Cusk
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
I tell you, mythology I think of as the homeland of the Muses, the inspirers of poetry. And to see life as a poem, and yourself participating in a poem, is what the myth does for you.
~ Joseph Campbell
There are some who believe the poem can be a guide, a Virgil, can be a window into a way of being. Do I believe this? Does anyone believe this anymore?
~ Joseph Stroud
That girl will rain destruction down on you and your ship. She is an albatross, Captain. Way I remember it, albatross was a ship's good luck, 'til some idiot killed it. (to Inara) Yes, I've read a poem. Try not to faint.
~ Joss Whedon
My mind rattled on fast as a machine sometimes, ran its own way without my participation. So I'd know the answer to the algebra problem but not the steps to that answer. Or what a poem like Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken meant but not ho to explain it.
~ Joyce Carol Oates