Poetic Significance Quotes

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

I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.

Every old poem is sacred.

The role of the poet is almost nothing...drearily nothing. And when he steps outside of his boots and tries to get tough as our dear Ezra [Pound] did, he will get his pink little ass slapped.

If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.

...we're all in a soup of trying to live by words, and trying to live by poetry. It's both humbling, and really flattering to know that my words are part of all that.

Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.

You must believe a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is.

One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

At certain times, men regard poetry merely as a bright flame, but to women it was, and always will be, a warm fire.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

I hope there is something worthy in my writings and not merely the novelty of a black face associated with the power to rhyme that has attracted attention.

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things. "The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize." "Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat."

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.