Poem Quotes

I went out to the hazel woodbecause a fire was in my headcut and peeled a hazel wandand hooked a berry to a threadand when white moths were on the wingand moth-like stars were flickering outI dropped the berry in a stream,and caught a little silver trout....(Song of Wandering Aengus)

~ W.b. Yeats

Keep Moving...Move forwardLet go Give inDecideand just DoProgress every dayAnd make one step forward no matter what's in your wayKeep moving, till one day you wake up and you're there.

~ Emma Daley

The yellow moon dreamilytipping buttons of lightdown among the leaves. Marimba,marimba - from beyond theblack street.Somebody dancing,somebodygetting the helloutta here. Shadows of catsweave round the treetrunks,the exposed knotty roots.(Scenes from the Life of the Peppertrees)

~ Denise Levertov

Then a hundred sad voices lifted a wail,And a hundred glad voices piped on the gale:'Time is short, life is short,' they took up the tale: 'Life is sweet, love is sweet, use to-day while you may;Love is sweet, and to-morrow may fail; Love is sweet, use to-day.

~ Christina Rossetti

Things it helps me to rememberWhen in a bad mood, keep quiet or still.Baggy jumpers don’t suit you.When you’re tired you get doubtful.Difficulties come in spurts.Listen to the echo of your own voice. Avoid be strident.All aeroplanes go through clouds during their journeys. So do people during theirs.Often greater clarity comes out of confusion. You have to be puzzled before you find a solution.PMS often brings on a crisis of confidence.Ordinariness is restful.If someone is explosive in front of you, be silent. If you feel explosive, be silent.

~ Aidan Chambers

For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.

~ Kathleen Raine

There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. 

~ Gerald Hausman

Let me also say I wanna make you sandwhiches,And soup,And peanut butter cookies,Though, the truth is peanutbutter is actually really bad for you 'cause they grow peanuts in old cotton fields to clean the toxins out of the soil,But hey, you like peanutbutter and I like you!

~ Andrea Gibson

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability ratherthanan asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates formwe are justified in supposingthat you must have brains. For you, a symbol of theunit, stiff and sharp,conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority andliking for everythingself-dependent, anything anambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, toattempt through sheerreserve, to confuse presumptions resulting fromobservation, is idle. You cannot make usthink you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you arebrilliant, itis not because your petals are the without-which-nothingof pre-eminence. Would you not, minusthorns, be a what-is-this, a mereperculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, theelements, or mildew;but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliancewithout co-ordination? Guarding theinfinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience tothe remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-membered too violently,your thorns are the best part of you.

~ Marianne Moore

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.

~ Paul Celan

You said we can't happen, but darling, we started happening the very first day we met.

~ J.a. Anum

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

~ Harold Bloom

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.

~ John Ashbery

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

~ Robert Frost

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.

~ Pablo Neruda

The moment of change is the only poem.

~ Adrienne Rich

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

~ John Barton

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

~ Mark Strand

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

~ James Schuyler