Best Poem Quotes

Human bodies are words, myriads of words; In the best poems reappears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay; ~ Walt Whitman

I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have. ~ Alex Lemon

The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident. ~ Dylan Thomas

Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet? ~ Boris Johnson

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys
while remaining in the human scale
to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing ~ Robert Bly

But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face; It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists; It is in his walk, the carraige of his next, the flex of his waist and knees--dress does not hide him; The strong, sweet supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel; To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more; You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. ~ Diana Gabaldon

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything. ~ Langston Hughes

People can put their best poems straight onto the web. ~ Roger McGough

Pasquale considered his friend's face. It had such an open quality, was such a clearly American face, like Dee's face, like Michael Deane's face. He believed he could spot an American anywhere by that quality - that openness, that stubborn belief in possibility, a quality that, in his estimation, even the youngest Italians lacked. Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries - America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires. This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy a great epic poem, Britain a thick novel, America a brash motion picture in Technicolor - and he remembered, too, Dee Moray saying she'd spent years "waiting for her movie to start," and that she'd almost missed out on her life waiting for it. ~ Jess Walter

Leave the glare and get under this meaning with me,
a bit soft but of interest, an aspect dawning,
or, more likely, debilitatingly tender,
like the hour just prior to some sought-after thought
that comes nothing like rushing there to be with you.

"Love Poem," Mississippi Review (vol. 46, no. 3, Winter
2019) ~ Graham Foust

Bad tactics, and whoever this Caladan Brood is, he's shown himself adept at making us pay for our mistakes." "Caladan Brood," Calot murmured. "I swear I've heard that name somewhere before. Odd that I've never given it much thought." Tattersail's eyes narrowed on Tayschrenn. Calot was right: the name of the man commanding the Tiste Andii alongside the Crimson Guard did sound familiar - but in an old way, echoing ancient legends, perhaps, or some epic poem. ~ Steven Erikson

The taste of the apple ... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way ... poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

It's time to live now, Cilka," he says. "Without fear, and with the miracle of love." "Is that a poem?" she asks him, smiling through her tears. "It is the beginning of one. ~ Heather Morris

Every word was once a poem. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Girls, I was dead and down
in the Underworld, a shade,
a shadow of my former self, nowhen.
It was a place where language stopped,
a black full stop, a black hole
Where the words had to come to an end.
And end they did there,
last words,
famous or not.
It suited me down to the ground.

So imagine me there,
unavailable,
out of this world,
then picture my face in that place
of Eternal Repose,
in the one place you'd think a girl would be safe
from the kind of a man
who follows her round
writing poems,
hovers about
while she reads them,
calls her His Muse,
and once sulked for a night and a day
because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns.
Just picture my face
when I heard -
Ye Gods -
a familiar knock-knock at Death's door.

Him.
Big O.
Larger than life.
With his lyre
and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize.

Things were different back then.
For the men, verse-wise,
Big O was the boy. Legendary.
The blurb on the back of his books claimed
that animals,
aardvark to zebra,
flocked to his side when he sang,
fish leapt in their shoals
at the sound of his voice,
even the mute, sullen stones at his feet
wept wee, silver tears.

Bollocks. (I'd done all the typing myself,
I should know.)
And given my time all over again,
rest a ~ Carol Ann Duffy

When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises - because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut off from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning. ~ Rajneesh

But the rare herb, Forgetfulness, / It hides away from me. ~ Jeanne Robert Foster

A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights. ~ Charles Simic

Life is the season for loving and caring,
for laughing and caroling, giving and sharing.

Christmas is meant for the same, people say,
which makes life like Christmastime every day. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I need geometry to set the grammar of the image expressive language . The structural skeleton, the composition and the geometric layout provide a perspective from which one can read the image; otherwise we would do what Dadaists did when they put words in a little bag and then took them out at random in order to compose a poem. ~ Augusto De Luca

You ask
if I will write a poem
I could,
I suppose
write the most
splendiferous
one of all

but not
right
now
not when

your hands
are brewing
warm
cinnamon tea
across my skin

not when I'm
trying to imagine
what might happen
if you began
flowering
kisses
upon
me

My dear,
how can
I write
a poem
when I'm already
inside one? ~ Sanober Khan

Several performers have told me that they do the following brief lovingkindness meditation if they have stage fright: Standing in front of an audience, before they start acting, playing music, or reciting a poem, they send out wishes for the well-being of everyone in the room. 'When I do that,' one singer told me, 'I no longer have a sense of the audience as a group of hostile people out there waiting to judge me. I feel, okay, here we all are together. ~ Sharon Salzberg

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it
~ Franz Wright

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

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being. ~ Charles Olson

Change like a tree
When it is winter
Don't complain or fear
Just wait for the spring
To bloom and sing ~ Debasish Mridha

When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you're writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It's sacred and it's secret, even to the writer. ~ Martin Amis

Does it hurt?' I nodded. 'You know Sekou Sundiata, in a poem, he said the most important part of the body 'ain't the heart or the lungs or the brain. The biggest, most important part of the body is the part that hurts. ~ John Green

Ashryver eyes.
The fairest eyes, from legends old
of brightest, ringed with gold. ~ Sarah J. Maas

i have no mind/just a series of clicks ~ Raegan Butcher

We are burning like a chicken wing left on the grill of an outdoor barbecue
we are unwanted and burning we are burning and unwanted
we are
an unwanted
burning
as we sizzle and fry
to the bone
the coals of Dante's 'Inferno' spit and sputter beneath
us
and
above the sky is an open hand
and
the words of wise men are useless
it's not a nice world, a nice world it's
not ... ~ Charles Bukowski

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away. ~ David Whyte

When Akira had recited the haiku to me the first time, I had been confused, thinking it compared love to storm clouds because they were capricious and fleeting. Perhaps love was capricious and fleeting, but that was not the true meaning of the poem. The true meaning was this: that love, when it came, was powerful enough to transform everything. Anything. Even the unchanging, ever-changing face of the Moon herself. ~ Zoe Marriott

Your gravity, your grace have turned a tide
In me, no lunar power can reverse;
But in your narcoleptic eyes I spied
A sightlessness tonight: or something worse,
A disregard that made me feel unmanned.
Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breath
To think I saw my future traced in sand
One afternoon "as still, as carved, as death,"
And pray for an oblivion so deep
It ends in transformation. Only dawn
Can save me, flood this haunted house of sleep
With light, and drown the thoughts that nightly warn:
Another lifetime is the least you'll need, to trace
The guarded secrets of her gravity, her grace. ~ Jonathan Coe

An axiom of sorcery: If you come to know yourself
no one else can know you ~ Rodney Hall

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem. ~ James Schuyler

there's nothing to
discuss
there's nothing to
remember
there's nothing to
forget

it's sad
and
it's not
sad

seems the
most sensible
thing
a person can
do
is
sit
with drink in
hand
as the walls
wave
their goodbye
smiles

one comes through
it
all
with a certain
amount of
efficiency and
bravery
then
leaves

some accept
the possibility of
God
to help them
get
through

others
take it
staight on

and to these

I drink
tonight. ~ Charles Bukowski

Perfection"

Every oak will lose a leaf to the wind.
Every star-thistle has a thorn.
Every flower has a blemish.
Every wave washes back upon itself.
Every ocean embraces a storm.
Every raindrop falls with precision.
Every slithering snail leaves its silver trail.
Every butterfly flies until its wings are torn.
Every tree-frog is obligated to sing.
Every sound has an echo in the canyon.
Every pine drops its needles to the forest floor.
Creation's whispered breath at dusk comes
with a frost and leaves within dawn's faint mist,
for all of existence remains perfect, adorned,
with a dead sparrow on the ground.


(Poem titled : 'Perfection' by R.H.Peat) ~ R.H. Peat

When i remember your name
i know you are my hope.
for what ?
not for love ...
'cause i know you can't love me.
but i know you are my hope for ... Life.
Just remembering your smile ...
i know you are my world
you shaping my world that became like this ...
you are my story
Not to be told,
But to remember ...
i love you
and ... I miss you now
i miss my world
i miss your face, your smile and your voice
I miss you more than anyone that I've ever met
-For Enno Indi WP- ~ Yulianto Eko P

I thought a bit of poetry might be interesting - I even write a few lines myself. I composed a short poem for my mum's 70th birthday recently. When I recited it I saw the glint of a tear in her eye ... although I guess it wasn't the quality of the poetry was that making her cry! ~ Iain Dowie

I don't like basements, but definitely basements could be poems. Not fond of skin diseases, but again, there's a pattern. Probably anything could be a poem. ~ Matthea Harvey

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. ~ Niall Williams

She's kind of a walking poem, she's this perfect beauty ... but at the same time very deep, very smart. ~ Johnny Depp

Flames moved towards him
and dropped within
-
singed and marred
his tender skin ...
(the frightful plight tale) ~ Muse

I'll die propped up in bed trying to do a poem about America. ~ Carl Sandburg

My dance is a sacred poem in which each movement is a word and whose every word is underlined by music. The temple in which I dance can be vague or faithfully reproduced, for I am the temple. ~ Mata Hari

I Never Told You
You can fill a book with everything I never said
Or the lines of a poem
Or an Empty pool
Or an empty bedroom, the candles all blown out
I never told you how the reflection of myself in your eyes
Was the only mirror I could bear to look at
Or how I fought every day
To transfuse the girl I saw there with the girl I am
I tried to breathe in the words you made me:
beautiful
good
brave
I tried to be them for you even though they were weighted with impossibility
I never told you
how I always feared the rough edges of myself were too sharp for you
and how I fought everyday to blunt them
To bring down the walls
To let you in
without cutting you because I could never bear to hurt you like the others did
Every day
a fierce pride roared in me
I was so lucky to know the truth
I was the beneficiary of your radiance
I basked in it and felt special
And if not for the pain of your solitude
I would have been content to be the only one
I never told you
How your touch made me feel like laughing and crying and singing all at once
How your hand passing over my skin where atrocities
Had not yet sloughed off,
Skin cells remembering the worst touches
Was like a tide washing over the ruddy sand
And leaving it whole and smooth
You made my skin forget
Gave me new memories
New sensations that didn't drag th ~ Emma Scott

Things are always terrible
for some people. The question
is the ratio of the palpable hurt
to the general session
of life in an era. ~ Maureen N. McLane

The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view ... The essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the natural there. The human being makes room for and makes use of those organisms that are not him. In that way the field is a poem to symbiosis, and a human contract with the natural. ~ Adam Nicolson