Poem Analysis Quotes

I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.

I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

A song is a poem set to music.

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

A great poem leaves so much room for everybody to have such a different reaction to it.

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.

The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.

You go to a poem to get the mystery - and sometimes you go to get more confused.

When a poem doesn't work, the first question to ask yourself is, 'Am I telling the truth?'

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

There's always an added element of a poem when it's read aloud because then you can really hear the rhythm, and the cadence, and even the pronunciation sometimes adds another layer to the poem.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.

So many poems you go into and come up empty.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Listen to presences inside poems.

What is the point of teaching how to analyse a poem or a piece of Shakespeare but not to analyse the Internet?