Poem Interpretation Quotes

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?

You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

One of Walt Whitman's best-known poems is this one: When I heard the learn'd astronomer,.... The trouble is, Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul didn't know any better

I think Miss Moore was right to cut "The Steeple-Jack" - the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, "Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it's hers, isn't it?" No; it's much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David's left leg.

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

I think the way poems are taught to high school students is completely counterintuitive; it sets up this sense of being the poem's adversary. The poem is sort of sneakily trying to outsmart you.

The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

As a poet who has the tools for interpreting the poem differently, you can begin to deconstruct it. But the human being who's like, "I know about conversation, I know about language, I know about hard times," will approach the poem differently.

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)