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/pˈoʊəm/ Listen

noun

Poem n.

A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction; contradistinguished from prose; as, the poems of Homer or of Milton.

A composition, not in verse, of which the language is highly imaginative or impassioned; as, a prose poem; the poems of Ossian.

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Etymology of 'Poem'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Poem" Quotes from Famous Books

... the title of the poem [ To Melvin Gardner: Suicide ], on p. 19, to [ To Melvin Gardner: ]—in the text, but not in the table of Contents. This may have been done in deference to the family—attitudes on suicide were once quite different than now—but as it has been quite some time, and the original ...

— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill

... simplicity a depth of introspection and a fusion of nature with human feeling which is a new content in the imaginative presentation of human experience. In connection with Goethe's Leipzig period we gave a specimen of the best work he was then capable of producing; when we place beside it such a poem as the following, we are reminded of the saying of Emerson that "the soul's advances are not made by gradation ... but rather by ascension ...

— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... trusting to chance and the star of his genius that the effect produced should be right and fine. He had no patience with chance effects. He wanted to know why and how. His was deliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem, the thing itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in sight and the means of realizing that end in his conscious possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure. On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases that came lightly and easily into ...

— Martin Eden • Jack London

... any satisfactory definition of poetry is almost equalled by the difficulty of defining with precision any one of its kinds; and the epigram in Greek, while it always remained conditioned by being in its essence and origin an inscriptional poem, took in the later periods so wide a range of subject and treatment that it can perhaps only be limited by certain abstract conventions of length and metre. Sometimes it becomes in all but metrical form a lyric; sometimes it hardly rises ...

— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... enterprise of forming one's literary taste is an enterprise of learning how best to use this means of life. People who don't want to live, people who would sooner hibernate than feel intensely, will be wise to eschew literature. They had better, to quote from the finest passage in a fine poem, "sit around and eat blackberries." The sight of a "common bush afire with God" might ...

— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett

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