Poet Quotes

Little brown boy,
Slim, dark, big-eyed,
Crooning love songs to your banjo
Down at the Lafayette—Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
High sort of and a bit to one side,
Like a prince, a jazz prince.

By the power of eloquence old truth receives a new habit; though its essence be the same, yet its visage is so altered that it may currently pass and be accepted as a novelty.

If I find it painful getting out of bed in the morning, I am likely to find it harder still in five years' time. Then you have to add that, though that is undoubtedly so, it is also quite possible that you won't be there in five years.

He gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.
Of Samuel Johnson

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

James Wright
James Wright
I loved thee once. I'll love no more,
Thine be the grief, as is the blame;
Thou art not what thou wast before,
What reason I should be the same?

People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was.

Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day.

My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

In loss itself I find assuagement: having lost the treasure, I've nothing to fear.

Juana Inés de la Cruz
Juana Inés de la Cruz
A simile is like a pair of eyeglasses, one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together.

George McWhirter
George McWhirter
Didn't I seize the fire of ideas and make them leap, tear, fly, sing

I seem to lose words like another person loses blood. Everyday, every day there's something gone. It leaks everywhere.

J. Bernlef
J. Bernlef
The first men that our Saviour dear
Did choose to wait upon him here,
Blest fishers were; and fish the last
Food was, that he on earth did taste:
I therefore strive to follow those
Whom he to follow him hath chose.

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.
The others throw to be comprehended. He Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

When I had curls
I knew more girls.
I do more reading
Now my hair is receding.

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

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
The country wears their going like a scar,
Today their relatives save to support and
Send others in planes for the new diaspora.

Solace of the night sky,
the hardly moving
face of the clock.

When liberty, this austere goddess,
Comes down to console people on earth;
That she finds them seated, in their heavy troubles,
On a ground cracked a thousand and four hundred years ago,
Her work which everywhere encounters a rebellious ground
Is very laborious before emerging beautiful

God of frostbite, God of famine,
beggars, cripples by the yard,
farms with no crops to examine—
that's him, that's your Russian God.

If there is any truth to my parenting the dreamwork movement, it comes from the power of the press.

I need to feel that the language in my poems is alive, in the sense of talking on the phone to a friend sharing gossip.

The chief characteristic of folly is that it mistakes itself for wisdom.