Best Poem Quotes

• Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.

  Emily Dickinson

  Inspirational, Life, Wise

  " 'Hope' is the thing with feathers" l. 1 (ca. 1862) SeeWoody Allen 20

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• The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep...

  Robert Frost

  Tattoo, Running, Taken

  "Stopping byWoods on a Snowy Evening" l. 13 (1923)

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• 

  But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

  Robert Frost

  Love, Inspirational, Tattoo

  "Stopping byWoods on a Snowy Evening" l. 13 (1923)

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• Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Dylan Thomas

  Tattoo, Good Night, Goodnight

  "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" l. 16 (1952)

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• I know why the caged bird sings.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Children, Book

  Title of book (1969), taken from the last line of "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar in Lyrics of Hearthside (1899). Cf. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1979) 567:10

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• Poetry: the best words in the best order.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Writing, Vocabulary, Prose Poetry

  Table Talk 12 July 1827 (1835)

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• 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

  Journey, Other Worlds, Wings

  Robert Bly (1986). “Selected poems”, Harper Perennial

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• Human bodies are words, myriads of words, (In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay, Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)

  Walt Whitman

  Gay, Men, Body

  Walt Whitman (2012). “Selected Poems”, p.65, Courier Corporation

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

  Dylan Thomas

  Texture, Moments, Intensity

  Dylan Thomas, Daniel Jones (1992). “On the Air with Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts”, p.60, New Directions Publishing

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

  Alex Lemon

  Thinking, Vessel, I Can

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.

  Nan Fairbrother

  Choices, Design, Landscape

  Nan Fairbrother (1974). “The nature of landscape design: as an art form, a craft, a social necessity”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• People can put their best poems straight onto the web.

  Roger McGough

  People

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

  Langston Hughes

  Writing, Worst, Felt

  Langston Hughes (2002). “The Collected Works of Langston Hughes”, p.65, University of Missouri Press

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• Natalie Lyalin is writing some of the best poems in the world. There is an evil in her gorgeous poem-hearts. She must have sold her heart to the devil to write like this—so beautiful, so funny and so strange. Her images stack and stack down the page without spilling, each line such a bombshell you'll start reading backward to the first line. These poems are like babies—they will pop out of trees.

  Zachary Schomburg

  Beautiful, Baby, Reading

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• I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.

  James Arthur

  Fighting, Thinking, Stubborn

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

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