20th-century Poet Quotes

Much that is natural, to the will must yield.
Men manufacture both machine and soul,
And use what they imperfectly control
To dare a future from the taken routes.

When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.

Its blasphemy enabled man to break free from the Bible and Koran with their life-denying fundamentalists and hell fire such fanatics love to fan.

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

Without you ghost ferries would cross the Mersey manned by skeleton crews

The strangest of our powers
Is the courage to live
Knowing that we will die,
Knowing nothing more true.

Everything that I write is a kind of battle won—or lost—against silence and incoherence.

And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is.

I love the process of being taken from where I am to somewhere else.

Josephine Jacobsen

Art is not self-expression while, for me, 'confessional poetry' is almost a contradiction in terms.

Elizabeth Jennings

I was raised to feel that doing nothing was a sin. I had to learn to do nothing.

There is no way to ease the burden. The voyage leads on from harm to harm, A land of others and of silence.

I swore I'd be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn't give a damn, just as long as I'd be in Chicago tomorrow.

Death, go somewhere, get lost! I'm not done as yet –
Joy still flows from the amphora of colors into my cupped hands.

Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmarks again
of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins,
Hornell--
their loneliness
given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

Map age genes place of origin
and love's lineaments. For mapped onto each body is love. Carthography of one's own country
or the contours of a foreign land

Whom the gods do not intend to destroy, they first make mad with poetry.

I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Remember the war against Franco?
That's the kind where each of us belongs.
Though he may have won all the battles,
We had all the good songs.

There is little character or loveliness in the face of someone who has shunned risk, avoided suffering and rejected life

Madeleine L'Engle

The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black firtrees are flakes
of white ash in the world's hearth.

Denise Levertov

I am more and more engrossed with the single poetic theme of Life and Death, for there doesn't seem to be any question more directly relevant than this one of what survives of all the beloved.

My best performances were when I was 30 years old, and I was a vegan.

Science is concerned with finding out and stating the facts: poetry's task is to give you the look, the smell, the taste, the "feel" of those facts.

Cecil Day Lewis

It is night,
And it is vanity, and age
Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear,
The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.