20th-century Poet Quotes

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?

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.

Step out onto the Planet. Draw a circle a hundred feet round. Inside the circle are 300 things nobody understands, and maybe nobody's ever really seen. How many can you find?

Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten... everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.

Gerald Early
Gerald Early
The lesson is that dying men must groan;
And poets groan in rhymes that please the ear.

And for a minute, maybe longer... everything that threatens us, threatens to save us.

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.

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

So many want to be lifted by song and dancing, and this morning it is easy to understand. I write in the sound of chirping birds hidden in the almond trees, the almonds still green and thriving in the foliage.

As a favor to me
Let's not talk any more about old dances.
I have an entire world on the tip of my tongue.

Cornelius Eady
Cornelius Eady
For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such as that of North America, is an act of resistance.

Strange with women when They find out you love men More than they Never let you kiss them On the mouth again.

When you win, we win; but when you go down, you go down alone.

Basked in the sun,listened to birds,licked off raindrops,and only in flightthe leaf saw the treeand graspedwhat it had been.

Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church
remind me of five hundred
middle passage blacks,
in a net, under water
in Charleston harbor
so redcoats wouldn't find them.
Can't find what you can't see
can you?

I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

Every vivid memory holds some essential truth about your vision of the world

It's horrifying how fast time flies. It's cold. No rain today. A strong wind. Walked around a lot, slept a lot. I've been sleeping 12–14 hours a day. Maybe that's why time is galloping by so fast.

Igor Kholin
Igor Kholin