20th-century Poet Quotes

Walking about? With a hole in his forehead full of maggots" "Aye. It were like a damn fisherman's tub.

Disappeared! What happened? Because I admire her poems, I've been trying to find out for years … according to some people she became a Sufi. Others say she entered a closed order. Others imagine her footloose and anonymous, travelling the wide world. In any event, no trace of her seems to survive - apart from the writing she left behind.

Intellectuals are rebels, not revolutionaries.

Languages are not owned
by nations but by the people who use them
and make them live.

Abdourahman Waberi

My view point is essentially that of questioning layman, who enquires in order to find out the why and whither of human conduct and the achievements of history as well as the prospects of civilization.

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar

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

I choose to politely ask myself to step aside if I am in my own way. If I do not get out of my way, I choose to call a friend who will have me removed.

Buddy Wakefield

The impulse here is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened with something almost intolerably vivid. When the deep purple blooms, you are looking at a dimension, not a posy.

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.

Sometimes very strong feelings don't get written up because the interesting metaphor or dramatic situation doesn't suggest itself. So much of one's life goes unused.

Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.

Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons. They simply extended into objective reality what was already a subjective reality. Only jailors really believe in jails.

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?

Don't allow the lucid moment to dissolve
Let the radiant thought last in stillness
though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers
We haven't risen yet to the level of ourselves.

Adam Zagajewski

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

The essay was impelled by Clare's anxiety that his poems were slipping out if fashion.

John Birtwhistle

Only brooms
Know the devil
Still exists,

That the snow grows whiter
After a crow has flown over it

The medatative approach acknowledges that one moment will inevitably lead on to the next. We accept immortality instead of fighting it off.

I woke early like a condemned man to the naivety of birdsong.

Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me." Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

Daniel Ladinsky