Quotes About Poem

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line.

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.

There is a difference between a poem and a writing incrusted with a feel of Poetry to fall within range

The sonnet, a lyrical poem, the beauty and magic... convey with our hearts the truth of the universe in a single moment briefly.

The reader who is illuminated is in a real sense the poem.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Writing a poem is a lesson in the truest empathy. And to truly have empathy is to truly know power, or at least the only kind of power I'm interested in.

The poem begins, "About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

First is a poem, a ballad, out of Scotland. You may say there is no king in it, and of course there isn't, which is what makes it so sad. The last line of the third verse, 'O he might hae been a king' is so sad that I don't like to look at it with both eyes at once.

But where the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to another, and where vicious manners are described, without being marked with the proper character of blame and disapprobation, this must be allowed to disfigure the poem, and to be a real deformity. I cannot, nor is it proper I should, enter into such sentiments; and however I may excuse the poet, on account of the manners of age, I can never relish the composition.

But here we call it Spring, when a young man's fancy turns, fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun, to touching in the dark. And the old man's? To worms in their garden box; stepping aside a moment in a poem that will remember, fitfully, who made it and the discord and stammer, and change of heart and catch of breath it sprang from. A bending down lightly to touch the earth.

Every single soul is a poem, written on the back of God's hand

I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.

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

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author. Reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination.