American Poet Quotes

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

All the things we hide in water
Hoping we won't see them go.
Forests growing under water
Press against the ones we know.

Don't compare yourself to anyone. Be happy to be the wonder unique, very special person that you are.

Susan Polis Schutz

Oh, hear Him within you speaking this infinite love, moving like some divine and audible leaven, lifting the sky of the soul with expansions of light, shaping new heights and new depths, and, at your stir of assent, spreading the mountains with flame, filling the hollows with Heaven.

Do they miss me at home, do they miss me?
'T would be an assurance most dear
To know that this moment some loved one
Was saying, 'Oh were she but here!'

Caroline Atherton Mason

I laugh, for hope hath happy place with me;
If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.

William Ellery Channing (poet)

Someone Should Write Me a Love Poem but I'm Stuck Doing It Myself

Daphne Gottlieb

In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roastbeef and potato.

A better man was Aristotle,
Pulling steady on the bottle.

John Crowe Ransom

I'm saying that the domain of poetry includes both oral & written forms, that poetry goes back to a pre-literate situation & would survive a post-literate situation, that human speech is a near-endless source of poetic forms, that there has always been more oral than written poetry, & that we can no longer pretend to a knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension.

Jerome Rothenberg

I am like a table
that eats its own legs off
because it's fallen
in love with the floor.

It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.

William Stafford (poet)

My boyhood saw
Greek islands floating over Harvard Square.

I am fevered with the sunset, I am fretful with the bay, For the wander-thirst is on me And my soul is in Cathay.

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

Strickland Gillilan

There is no great; there is no small; in the mind that causeth all

Nobody has died a sudden death in that house, Don Hermenegildo, they've all died bit by bit, long before they're apparently dead.

The things I have
are nameless,
old and true;
they may not be named;
few may live and know.

How can I appreciate light from an aging
sun shining through new configurations neither pine
nor ash? How can I extol the nuturing
fragrances from the spires, the spicules
of a landscape not yet formed or seeded?

Pattiann Rogers

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.

It is easy to be humble when a greater is preferred; but when an inferior is lifted high above our heads, how can we bear it?

Constance Fenimore Woolson

The self is no mystery, the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on

As for the common men apart, Who sweat to keep their common breath, And have no hour for books or art-- What dreams have these to hide from death!

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

Mattie Stepanek

It goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire novel.

Right here in our bodies, in our defense of our right to experience joy, in the refusal to abandon the place where we have been most completely invaded & colonized, in our determination to make the bombed & defoliated lands flower again and bear fruit, here where we have been most shamed is one of the most radical & sacred places from which to transform the world.

Aurora Levins Morales