Top 353 Poem Quotes

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture – that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully.

The animal encounter poem is now so distinct a genre that it would be possible to create a full-length anthology from deer encounter poems alone, and many varieties of experience would emerge from such an exercise.

Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She’s not a symbol.

I remember that as I was writing a poem on ‘Snow’ when I was eight, I said aloud, ‘I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.’

The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe.

But most commonly, it’s one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

The poet is the voice of the people. And when the poet presents certain ideas, two phrases in one poem can alter a generation’s view. So poets have always been feared – and controlled and jailed.

I thought I’d begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.

What makes a poem is the discipline inherent in making a poem: trying to fit feelings in the requisite number of syllables and lines, disciplining one’s feelings.

A really good poem is full of music.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn’t something I make. The poem is something I serve.

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

It’s a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

The first time I ever got up on a stage, I did a comedy poem. I don’t know how I got there in the first place because I was very, very shy.

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

The poem that became the song ‘Gold All Over the Ground’ was written during 1967, when my dad was really falling in love with my mother.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn’t suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I’ve written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn’t know was in you, or in the world.

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.

When I was in Marine training I memorised ‘The Waste Land,’ which was a significant experience in terms of really breaking apart language and thinking about how the different voices in that poem function.

Usually, a number of events will be going on around me to start me on a book. What I mean is, I will have read a poem or seen a picture that is lingering in my mind.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

The poem is never complete in the mind. It emerges, and then it’s like an act of unveiling. The unveiling is the longest and most difficult part of it.

Ooh, it’s too embarrassing to share my innermost romantic secrets – although I have written Danielle the odd poem. If anything they are more comedic than romantic. They used to be well-received but that was before she started studying Shakespeare at drama college. Now I feel so inept.

I’ve been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats’ ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.

Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.

A poem, once it’s written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I’m certain. Poems were shorter than essays.

Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

My favorite poem ever was ‘Annabel Lee’ by Edgar Allan Poe.

From the reader’s view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

One of the things women poets have been engaged in – among the other things they’ve been doing – is revising parts of the poetic self. Re-examining notions of the authority within the poem, and of the poem.

I’m writing a poem right now about a nose. I’ve always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it’s a ludicrous subject. That’s why, when I was younger, I was afraid of something that didn’t make a lot of sense. But now I’m not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn’t matter.

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.

My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he’d tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.

Whether it’s a song or a television show, or a book or poem, art is the thing that cracks me open and encourages me to go on a deeper journey to find my own compassion and empathy and humanity.