Top 100 American Poetry Quotes
#1. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
Robert Hass
#2. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.
Diane Wakoski
#3. I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But there's no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.
David Biespiel
#4. From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
Diane Wakoski
#5. I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
Mark Strand
#6. I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry.
Christian Wiman
#7. Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.
Christian Wiman
#8. Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
Helen Vendler
#9. Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
Diane Wakoski
#10. She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
James Dickey
#11. I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
Robert Morgan
#12. I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
Robert Morgan
#13. I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
Diane Wakoski
#14. One of the most treasured books that I own is Donald Allen's 'The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.' It was a totem of great importance and potency to my group of writer friends in college from 1960 to 1964.
Peter Coyote
#15. I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.
Philip Levine
#16. I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.
Mark Strand
#17. American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
Diane Wakoski
#18. What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
Adrienne Rich
#19. The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.
John Green
#20. The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.
Peter Gizzi
#21. I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.
Jay Parini
#22. I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
Norman MacCaig
#23. Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
Robert Morgan
#24. American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict ... We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare
Muriel Rukeyser
#25. Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.
O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac
Frank O'Hara
#26. High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
Diane Wakoski
#27. As hard as the diamonds in your smile,
the wind carries its hammers with no hands
and sustains a moan with no mouth,
seems to cradle solitude in its rough arms like firewood
to be burned in my house as it passes through
and asks, Where does she sparkle from?
B.J. Ward
#28. A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly.
B.J. Ward
#29. The words I speak to these chairs
must be silencing.
It has stunned them
into a profound emptiness.
No creaking from the gallery
no James Joyce here, nor Malory
An unknown author
in a very large chain
can't you hear me rattling?
B.J. Ward
#30. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.
Robert Lowell
#31. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#33. I was around in 1970, and now I am around in 2015 ... there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'
Don McLean
#35. For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.
Robert Pinsky
#36. You better ignore this.
You better staple your eyes shut
and put pot-lids over your ears
and pinch your nose with vice grips
and cement your mouth shut
with real cement and while
you're at it or in it or whatever
cut off your hands for good measure
B.J. Ward
#37. SOME PEOPLE SIMPLY DO NOT EXIST ANYMORE. GET USED TO IT. QUESTION MARK.
Amy King
#38. When their voices didn't reach my ears,
I rebelled against my own skin
too young to realize that without their
stories I would starve.
Kiana Davis
#39. STUFF POETS STILL LIKE: POETRY
Amy King
#40. IT'S NOT THE HONEY WHISKEY IN A FRIDAY NIGHT - IT'S THE MANIC SHOW OF POETRY TWEETS THAT TURNS ME ON.
Amy King
#42. Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
Robert Morgan
#43. Life on
Life on the reservation
Life on the reservation is dirty
Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy
Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy dogs.
(Dena Colhoff, student)
Timothy P. McLaughlin
#44. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Walt Whitman
#45. As the American poet, Marianne Moore, said: There is a great deal of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.
William Strunk Jr.
#46. I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.'
Paul Engle
#47. Leads to Bear Down
Bear Down
gives way to little crown
Crown concedes the Head
then Head produces All
Snip the fruity cord
little King begins to bawl
then grows bored
So begins his fall
B.J. Ward
#50. Happy World Poetry Day: 'The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.
Aberjhani
#51. Inspiration.
five minutes in the back of a greyhound bus;
the world passing by.
a gateway to freedom.
the american dream.
from the american dream
K.R. Albers
#52. Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.
Louise Gluck
#53. A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#54. DESPITE THE INVENTION OF TIME MACHINES, WE KEEP BEING LINEAR.
Amy King
#55. Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.
Billy Collins
#56. Being an American in Australia isn't easy,
but I'm trying to integrate, I'm trying to fit in.
Billy Marshall Stoneking
#57. I'd reconstruct Heaven, or usurp Hell
write till I swing open like a door hinge.
I arrive - a rogue who'd refurbish town.
I take my pen, begin to nail things down.
B.J. Ward
#58. WORDS SHLD BE FREE. RELEASE THEM FROM THEIR SENTENCES.
Amy King
#61. Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden
#62. Listen, / my wary one, it's far too late / to unlove each other.
William Matthews
#63. He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line "The land was ours before we were the land's." What a scandal that would be, America's best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.
Jim Harrison
#64. Out in this profane city,
sometimes sidewalks
seem the only cement that connects us,
pressed by the sacred strangers
we will never touch.
B.J. Ward
#65. The Anglo-American can indeed cut down and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological
Henry David Thoreau
#66. Isn't it worth missing whatever joy / you might have dreamed, to wake in the night and find / you and your beloved are holding hands in your sleep?
Galway Kinnell
#67. I too have known the inward disturbance of exile,
The great peril of being at home nowhere,
The dispersed center, the dividing love;
Not here, nor there, leaping across ocean,
Turning, returning to each strong allegiance;
American, but with this difference - parting.
May Sarton
#68. The statement 'There is nothing more American than an Indian' happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity point loss.
Charles Slagle
#69. An English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance ...
Stephen Spender
#70. Where the mountain crosses.
On top of the mountain, I do not myself know where.
I wandered where my mind and my heart seemed to be lost.
I wandered away.
Jane Bierhorst
#71. America - where we hate our
fathers, love our mothers, and
everyone is hung up on trying
to be a man
Phil Volatile
#72. These words are my mother's,
my father's, my brother's, my lender's, my garbage
man's - the poem runs
like oil on fire
beneath this earth where we know each other.
Witness the black smoke everywhere.
B.J. Ward
#73. The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.
Nikki Giovanni
#74. ERRORS ARE WHAT MAKE US HUMAN. PLOT TWIST: I'M A HORSE.
Amy King
#75. Poet' had always sounded like a profession to me, or a talent. But the dead American [Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry] made it sound like a faith.
Ariel Gore
#76. SPOILER ALERT: EVERYONE FALLS IN LOVE & DIES!
Amy King
#77. Little bucktoothed alligator
ready to taste my bills.
Make something suffer.
Make something stick.
B.J. Ward
#78. He Said...
Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul, My Love.
Anne Spencer
#79. THE AMPUTATED HEART
BEATS HARDER
Amy King
#80. ...citizens of the U.S. live under an Empire of "evil doers" who have set themselves juxtaposed to humanity instilling in us from our youngest days how to slay our human element in exchange for an external existence of malnourished pride.
Steven Storm
#81. From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.
Joseph Bruchac
#82. gravity chains us to the asphalt with such grace,
we think it is kind.
Maura O'Connor
#83. She fell in love with her doctor's stethoscope, the way it listened to her heart.
Russell Edson
#84. The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.
James F. Cooper
#85. YOU SAY "POET" LIKE THAT MEANS SOMETHING.
Amy King
#86. So Lightning says to Mud,
"What would happen if I struck your blood?"
And Mud says, "Brother,
It would hurt,
And make me the mother
Of every living thing.
But, Fire Boy, you ain't lifting my grass skirt
Until you burn me a ring.
Sherman Alexie
#87. Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.
Stephen Burt
#88. HER BARBED-WIRE SMILE
LIFTED YOU TO HEAVEN
BUT I HAVE TO ASK
DID GOD LOOK LIKE HER VOICE
Amy King
#89. Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.
John Galsworthy
#90. In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.
Stephen Burt
#91. I don't think rap really fits in to 'American Idol' in the sense that I believe rap is an art form in itself more akin to poetry, more akin to drama, if you will.
Nigel Lythgoe
#92. This dark December day inspires him to write / the plainest things in the snow, then walk away.
Chard DeNiord
#93. No matter how hard I try to forget you, you always come back to my thoughts
When you hear me singing I am really crying for you.
Jane Bierhorst
#94. We weep,
tears of blood,
we weep,
In despair, crying,
we weep;
the sun forever has stolen
the light from his eyes.
No more his face do we see,
no more his voice do we hear,
nor will his affectionate gaze
watch over his people.
Jane Bierhorst
#95. POETRY HAS A PEPTIC PRESENCE. PRESENTLY.
Amy King
#96. This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)
Kellie Elmore
#97. From ragbag, stumblebum, peripatetic lout
To bonfire of catnip that burns itself out
Bristled sack of hiss & claws
Cinched at the maw
B.J. Ward
#98. The judge sentenced us to life
real, awake life
out of the jails we had been roaming in
life in prism
then started handing out fines
for parking too long.
B.J. Ward
#99. I am thinking of poets who haven't written well in years
but who rubbed against the sun twenty years ago
Aren't they in their own kinds of prisons too?
B.J. Ward
#100. The house burned in the fire. Her house. Her prison of lies and of denial. Her American dream turned nightmare."~Unbreakable Heart
Kimberly Kinrade
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