Poetic Theme Quotes

I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.

Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.

My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.

If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring.

... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.

I had this idea for a long time to make a film about a poet in Paterson named Patterson. I wanted him to be working class. Eventually I thought a bus was a perfect visual way to move him, to drift him through the city, to have a measured kind of routine lifestyle. And all these things kind of congealed into the film "Paterson" eventually.

A Herd of Turtles' is the only song on 'Behold Electric Guitar' that is not strictly instrumental. But instead of singing, I am reciting a poem. My poem is about overcoming challenges.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.