#poem

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said. ↗

— James Laughlin

#goes #idea #just #long #me

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats. ↗

— Irving Layton

#best #genius #i #i am #keats

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it. ↗

— Philip Levine

#gone #i #left #poem #then

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity. ↗

— Philip Levine

#i #intensity #lot #most #poem

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem. ↗

— Philip Levine

#carried #created #destroy #dominant #i

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote. ↗

— Philip Levine

#get #how #intensely #into #notion

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster? ↗

— C. Day Lewis

#earth #expresses #good #however #just

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are. ↗

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#feminine #french #life #like #masculine

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear. ↗

— Thomas Lynch

#itself #line #lines #pair #poem

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

— Norman MacCaig

#influenced #job #many #particular #person