Carl Sandburg - Poetry Quotes

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Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Carl Sandburg