Quotations About Poems

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. ~E.M. Forster


Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. ~Marianne Moore


A poem is never finished, only abandoned. ~Paul Valéry


Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. ~Robert Frost


You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. ~Dylan Thomas


If you've got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow. ~Terri Guillemets


I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. ~Robert Frost


The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. ~Richard Rosen


The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. ~Aristotle


He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton


The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics. ~Edgar Allan Poe



The poem...is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life. ~Robert Penn Warren



If the author had said "Let us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem. ~Author Unknown


A poem begins with a lump in the throat. ~Robert Frost



If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. ~Thomas Hardy



A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. ~Robert Frost


Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. ~Don Marquis


No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers. ~Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)