American Poet Quotes

Emily Dickinson
Robert Frost
Jack Kerouac
Walt Whitman
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
W. H. Auden
Joseph Brodsky

Summary riposte
To the dreary wail
There's no knowing what
Love is all about.
Poets know a lot.

Robert Frost
Robert Frost
I tasted - careless - then -
I did not know the Wine
Came once a World - Did you?
Oh, had you told me so -
This Thirst would blister - easier - now

Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

Joan D. Vinge
Joan D. Vinge
The splendor of Silence,—of snow-jeweled hills and of ice.

This is not what I meant to keep
I thought of bitter-bright rememberings
pressed petals of forget—me—nots
or once-bold daffodils
not this hardness,
not
these bitter stalks of
weeds

Darlings of the forest! Blossoming alone When Earth's grief is sorest For her jewels gone - Ere the last snow-drift melts, your tender buds have blown.

Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives Before take-off, before we find ourselves Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith
I will look at the footprints going in and out of the water and dream up a small blue good to talk to.

Gerald Stern
Gerald Stern
The worst part of losing good fish is that you cannot release them. They tailwalk across the back of your mind for days.

The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.

Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker
We, poet and magic myth-making Giant of Song, wander on. Holy the bones of our ancestors wrapped in Pyramids resting 'til the end of Time Holy the Magi, priests and Myth-scientists of Africa for sending him to us.

Ireland regards sex, when she regards it at all, with an entirely primitive and practical eye.

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly.

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.

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

And you, whiner, who wastes your time
Dawdling over the remorseless earth,
What evil, what unspeakable crime
Have you made your life worth?

For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

The West for me means ambition, the East contentment. My heart is ever in one, my soul in the other.

Ameen Rihani
Ameen Rihani
Chemistry having its equations beyond our range of inequation.

If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.

I believe if I should die,
And you should kiss my eyelids where I lie
Cold, dead, and dumb to all the world contains,
The folded orbs would open at thy breath,
And from its exile in the Isles of Death
Life would come gladly back along my veins.

Just stand aside and watch yourself go by; Think of yourself as 'he' instead of 'I'.

Three hundred years we slaved,
We slave and suffer yet;
Though flesh and bone rebel,
They tell us to forget!

When you write, you can hide behind your words. When you talk, you are up front, like the clown in the midway booth; and passersby can bean you with a ball.

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