Quotes About Poem

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

Heart, it doesn't matter. We were only sleeping to let the poem know where to find us. Now let it rain. Let the avalanche of hours we've spent apart have their say. Only they have the power to make these words bear my heartprint as they fall outside the dream. — Tess Gallagher, from "Because the Dream Is My Tenderest Arm," Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2011)

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

This isn't about love and hate, Helen says. It's about control. People don't sit down and read a poem to kill their child. They just want the child to sleep. They just want to dominate. No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have your own way. The masochist bullies the sadist into action. The most passive person is actually an aggressor.

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle

a poem is only finished when the last reader has read it or listened to it.

History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.

Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world.

"The Ancient Mariner" — This poem would not have taken so well if it had been called "The Old Sailor"...

WANTED: A needle swift enough To sew this poem into a blanket.

The poem is, then, a little myth of man's capacity for 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.

We are God's art. We are God's poem, created to display His beauty and goodness.

To learn by heart is to learn By hurt—grief inscribing Its wisdom in the soft tissue. Song you sing, poem you are— Finger moving, precise As a phonograph needle, Along the groove of scar.

Dharma, in any case, is at the heart of the poem; it is not only untranslatable, but the Mahabharata's characters are still trying to figure it out at the epic's end.

It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.

I read a poem once that had a line in it about a white radiance that stains eternity.

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

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

i am a woman and a poem. – visceral