Quotes About Poem

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men. Polonius

There is a comfort in the strength of love; 'Twill make a thing endurable, which else Would overset the brain, or break the heart. - Michael: A Pastoral Poem

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable loss.

Along the way, I picked up an Old Scots word for dreariness: dreich. The man who taught it to me sold gorgeous cashmere scarves made in Scotland and had just finished reciting a Robert Burns poem to me. Dreich, he explained, "means . . . nothingness." He pointed outside and said, "It means that," referring to the gray spitty skies that hadn't once shown the sun while I'd been there. Dreich. A perfect word both in sound and meaning.

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the houseNot a creature was stirring—not even a mouse;The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.

The chief defect of Henry KingWas chewing little bits of string.

There was a young lady of Niger Who smiled as she rode on a tiger; They returned from a ride With the Lady inside And the smile on the face of the tiger.

She says that if this were a movie, someone would find a poem about cursed snakes and it would give us the clue we needed

Roses are red, and here is something new, violets are violet not really blue.

I always think of that Eliot poem, about the vision and the reality. 'Between the idea and the reality / Between the motion and the act / Falls the Shadow,' he says. Listen to your stentorian teacher voice. I do feel like I'm shrinking the Shadow a bit.

It's from an Amy Lowell poem we all loved in college. Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential.' 'Wine, I suppose.' 'Would it have turned to bread?

The poem presents maternal love as a paradox: monstrous on the one hand and "the only fortress strong enough to trust to" on the other.

What was hard was discovering the true life of the poem inside its technical scaffolding.

The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight.

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.

I wrote a poem once — a simple thing, but instinct with longing — while sitting under a tree and listening to the cooing of a pigeon. But that was in the afternoon. My only longing now was for a gun. Three

This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel, America, a brash motion picture in technicolor...

You didn't have time to prepare the rhyming good-bye poem done in the style of Dr. Seuss? I do not like to basket weave. / I do not like when Sabin leaves. / I do not like—

The Gita is not an aphoristic work, it is a great religious poem.

Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.

Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.

A elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written.

Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true "Poem on His Birthday

Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can't see things like the secret commonwealth, it's because rationality's vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can't see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it's the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure ...