Poet Quotes

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.

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

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.

Oft as by chance, a little while apart The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn, Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart, Beams like a jewel on the breast of dawn.

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

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 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.

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

Say, boys! if you give me just another whiskey I'll be glad, And I'll draw right here a picture of the face that drove me mad. Give me that piece of chalk with which you mark the baseball score, You shall see the lovely Madeleine upon the bar-room floor.

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

James Wright
James Wright
We are no more content to plod along the beaten paths - and so marriage must go the way of God.

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

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.

How happily, how happily, the flowers die away!
Oh! Could we but return to earth as easily as they.

Is it not easy to conceive the World in your Mind? To think the Heavens fair? The Sun Glorious? The Earth fruitful? The Air Pleasant? The Sea Profitable? And the Giver bountiful? Yet these are the things which it is difficult to retain. For could we always be sensible of their use and value, we should be always delighted with their wealth and glory.

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?

We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.

Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché
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.

I was most incorrigibly devoted to versifying, and all my spouse's wholesome admonitions had no manner of effect on me; in short, I believe this scribbling itch is an incurable disease...

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

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

I know I could enchain him with a smile:
And lead him captive with a gentle word,
I scorn my look should ever man beguile,
Or other speech, than meaning to afford.

Like as the armed knight
Appointed to the field,
With this world will I fight,
And faith shall be my shield…
I am not she that list
My anchor to let fall,
For every drizzling mist
My ship substantial.

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