Character Quote by William Carlos Williams

A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.

— Paul Verlaine

A poem is a small machine made of words.

— William Carlos Williams

A poem is a small machine made out of words.

— William Carlos Williams

A poem is a flexible thing, and a poem is a poem.

— Juan Felipe Herrera

Poetry is a very complex art… It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

— Ezra Pound

Poetry is a language for when you can't quite write prose about something, you can't quite say it, but if you do a poem,…

— Sakyong Mipham

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it…

— Harold Bloom

Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for…

— Dorianne Laux

A poem employs both the sound and the sense of language, it treats words not just as signifiers but as a plastic medium of…

— Campbell McGrath

A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.

— W. H. Auden

A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text.

— Louise Rosenblatt

A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.

— Sven Birkerts