At its best a poem full of space and reverie.
En vano te hemos prodigado el oce ano, En vano el sol, que vieron los maravillados ojos de Whitman; Has gastado los an os y te has gastado, Y todav|a no has escrito el poema. We have lavished the ocean on you in vain, In vain the sun that was seen by Whitman's astounded eyes; You have spent your years and you have spent yourself, But you haven't written the poem yet.
There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
Une danse est un poe' me. A dance is a poem.
A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it. 284
Aphorismsgive you more for your time and money than any other literary form.Only the poem comes near to it, but then most good poems either start off from an aphorism orarrive at one Aphorisms and epigrams are the corner-stones of literaryart.
Neither our vices nor our virtues further the poem.
It is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem.
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its ownmelting. A poemmay be worked overonce it isin being, but may not be worried into being.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal woundthat he will never get over it.
A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.
I have met with women whom I really think would liketo be married to a poem, and to be given away by a novel.
A poem is at once the most primitive and most sophisticateduse of language, but myemphasisis onthe former.
No one can read a poem unless he realises that it is a physical object as well as an abstract vehicle for conveying ideas. A poem has a material existence like a piece of music or sculpture or a plate of meat.
I could never begin a poem: 'When I am dead' In case it tempted Fate, and Fate gave way.
A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
A poem should not mean But be.
If the poem can be improved by its author's explanations, it should never have been published.
What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then? If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters'thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admire' d themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest.
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any otheranimals. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and thescience of metaphysics.
The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art.
If I be evil intreated, or sent away with a flea in mine ear, let him look that Iwill rail onhimsoundly; nor foranhour or a day, whiles the injury is fresh in my memory; but in some elaborate polished poem, which I will leave to the world when I am dead, to be a living image to all ages of his beggarly parsimony and ignoble illiberality.
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants. SeeAuden 40:2.
The best way to read [a poem] is offthetop of yourhead, and out of the corner of your eye.
A chryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore.
The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.
The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.
The poem in the rock and The poem in the mind Are not one. It was in dying I tried to make them so.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but whichthe middle-aged man can't.
Un poe' me n'est jamais acheve c'est toujours un accident qui le termine, c'est-a' -dire qui le donne au public. A poem is never finished; it is always an accident that puts a stop to it, that gives it to the public.
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem. See Frost 338:84.
The poemis a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we seeit is, rather, a light by which we may seeand what we see is life.
What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self- understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.
No race can prosper until it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.
The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
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