Quotes About Poems

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

These poems are a mental sketch as formed / Passage by passage of light and shade / Maintained and preserved to this point / Brought together in paper and mineral ink

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

And me happiest when I compose poems: Love, power, the huzza of battle are something, are much: yet a poem includes them like a pool water and reflection.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems

Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.

I read somewhere that dedications are like coded love letters, but I always seem to lay us out bare.Sorry for the poems.

The attention was flattering. For the first five minutes. Now I know how poems feel.

Certainly many if not most of Sufi love poems can be read as if they were addressed to a woman. In fact, without doubt a certain number of them were inspired by a woman's beautiful features, but this did not prevent the poet from viewing her loveliness as the mirror of God's Beauty. (p. 287)

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.

It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.

I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.

It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.

There are real facts in my poems, but facts mixed up in the perverse stubborn stew of imagination, add a pinch or two of revenge and retribution, a dash of amplification and reparation.

In the poems of . . . Robinson Jeffers, it is a style of consciousness rather than of language we see most in an altered light, some shadowed corner of experience newly illumined and made perceptible by words.

What surprises, etymology tells us, is what is "beyond grasp." Even the mind of the author cannot seem to keep what has been found: great poems exceed their creators. They are more capacious, capricious, compassionate, original, witty, strange, avaricious for beauty and range. The writer's life, the historical times, do not make the art. Art makes art.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like Fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the worlds soft decay.

Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you