Quote

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.

— John Ashbery

Sentiment: NEGATIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

— David Carradine

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

— Robert Penn Warren

Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.

— C. K. Williams

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

— Edward Hirsch

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

— Natasha Trethewey

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

— Anne Stevenson

I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.

— Andrew Motion

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

— Spike Jonze

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

— Allen Tate

✗Opposing Perspectives

What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle, someone, somewhere, will be able to find it and read it. That is all I need, as a poet, and that is the beauty, the luxury of my position. My lyric is mine and remains mine. Nobody can ruin it.

— James Fenton