What are poems?

Famous quotes containing the word poems:

“I try to make a rough music, a dance of the mind, a calculus of the emotions, a driving beat of praise out of the pain and mystery that surround me and become me. My poems are meant to make your mind get up and shout.”
—Judith Johnson Sherwin (b. 1936)

“This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue’s wrangle,
the world’s pottage, the rat’s star.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)

“I know an Englishman,
Being flattered, is a lamb; threatened, a lion.”
—George Chapman c. 1559–1634, British dramatist, poet, translator. repr. In Plays and Poems of George Chapman: The Tragedies, ed. Thomas Marc Parrott (1910)