20th-century Poet Quotes

Euryalus, is it
the gods who put this fire in our minds,
or is it that each man's relentless longing
becomes a god to him?

then bite the tongue out by the root…
and chew, never swallow.
This is not sex, remember;
you are eating the sea.

Wires instead of veins. that's what writers are made of. We get these electric demands & if we don't co-operate, we don't get to go to sleep. wired. Coffee nerves without the coffee.

We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.

Elsa Gidlow
Elsa Gidlow
That enchantment that I lightly took
Out of the lovely April is for ever.

Léonie Adams
Léonie Adams
O, she walked unaware of her own increasing beauty
That was holding men's thoughts from market or plough,

The theme of Death is to Poetry what Mistaken Identity is to Drama.

Dannie Abse
Dannie Abse
ABOMUNISTS JOIN NOTHING BUT THEIR HANDS OR LEGS, OR OTHER SAME.

Infinite is a meaningless word: except – it states / The mind is capable of performing / an endless process of addition.

And upsidedown in the earth a dead man walks upon my soles when I walk.

Bill Knott (poet)
Bill Knott (poet)
Papiamentu is our soul. The language is the only thing that distinguishes us from other nations. We must propagate Papiamentu at schools, at home, in the church, the university, worldwide and up into the heaven, so that we will not lose our soul. Do you share this feeling?

Frank Martinus Arion
Frank Martinus Arion
Life is a slow suicide, and it is happening to every intellectual.

There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.

A poem needs nervous tension, like an arrow needs a bowstring.

There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark.

Pig sit still in the strainer
I must have my Pig tea

One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters.

When we neglect the artist in ourselves, there is a kind of mourning that goes on under the surface of our busy lives.

Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages.

I don't trust beauty anymore / when will I stop believing it?

Go sow your wild oats
And reap as you will;
I hoe in one furrow
And heap all my fill.

You should speak out because if you don't, it's going to harm you.

Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine
I had a perfect confidence, still unshaken, in books. If you read enough you would reach the point of no return. You would cross over and arrive on the safe side. There you would drink the strong waters and become addicted, perhaps demented - but a Reader.