20th-century Poet Quotes

And the faith that grows out of questioning is stronger than the faith born of blind acceptance. It can withstand the shocks of circumstance. Only he who questions the universe and questions it in utter honesty can grow in his comprehension of the truth.

As I stood on the lonely backroad, I'm sure I heard birds, kookaburras, laughing...

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

The person who wrote the poem can tell you more about the poem than anyone else.

First, a poem must be magical, then musical as a sea-gull and it must hold fire as well.

Jose Garcia Villa
Jose Garcia Villa
The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning,

Restless, incautious, I want to talk violence,
Speak wild poems, hush, be still, pray grace
Taken forever; and after, lie long in the dense
Dark of your embrace, asleep between earth and space.

To rid the grass of weed, to get
The whole root,
Thick, tangled, takes a strong mind

And desire - to make clean, make pure.
The weed, tough
As the rock it leaps against,

Unless plucked to the last
Live fiber
Will plunge up through dark again.

The weed also has the desire
To make clean,
Make pure, there against the rock.

I don't believe in laying to rest the past. There are wounds we won't get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.

We come back to autumn,
to zucchini that wilt like witches' shoes...

You think you got something big to say? Something momentous? Or is it what you had to memorize in order to escape the men with lightning in their eyes?

John Yau
John Yau
It's always the good feel rotten.
Pleasure's for those who are bad.

Sergei Yesenin
Sergei Yesenin
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

Keith Douglas
Keith Douglas
To keep the fire burning brightly there's one easy rule: Keep the two logs together, near enough to keep each other warm and far enough apart - about a finger's breadth - for breathing room. Good fire, good marriage, same rule.

The old world is dying, but a new world is being born. It generates inspiration from the chaos that beats upon us all. The false grandeur and security, the unfulfilled promises and illusory power, the number of the dead and those about to die, will charge the forces of our courage and determination. The old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony on the living...

Loss leaves us empty - but learn not to close your heart and mind in grief. Allow life to replenish you. When sorrow comes it seems impossible - but new joys wait to fill the void.

Our children are beauty
with the right to be born.
Born anew at each a.m.
Like a child out of twilight,
flying toward sunlight,
Born anew at each a.m.

Nothing can ever be done;
things are intractably thus;
all know the bite of grief, all will be brought to
destiny's issue;
those who have precognition suffer
sorrow beforehand;
bodies are bankrupt, the main Expedition has
left us behind it.

If you want to love
Do so
To the ends of the earth
With no shortcuts
Do so
As the crow flies.

American diplomacy. It's like watching somebody trying to do joinery with a chainsaw.

If you have enough breath to complain about anything, you have more than enough reason to give thanks about something.

I am travelling from one April to another.
It is the same train between the same embankments.
Gorse fires are smoking, but primroses burn
And celandines and white may and gorse flowers.

Future's the only flower worth tending in this earth, where I sow my words daily: and you know, these good trees bear fruit round the year, discreetly, moving along the waterways and four seasons of the faithful sun.

My family dumplings are sleek and seductive, yet stout and masculine. They taste of meat, yet of flour. They are wet, yet they are dry. They have weight, but they are light. Airy, yet substantial. Earth, air, fire, water; velvet and elastic! Meat, wheat and magic! They are our family glory!

Robert P. T. Coffin
Robert P. T. Coffin
I will beg, will take to my knees, will listen to snow
stroking air, a sky of gasps, will open my mouth,
swallow, somewhere else the sky is falling,
somewhere else it gets back up.