Top 35 American Poets Quotes
#1. The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with poets that live far away. My main interest is contemporary American poets and some Spanish language poets, and I keep in touch with their work through either their websites or email.
John Burnside
#2. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#3. American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
Diane Wakoski
#4. The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts.
Susan Stewart
#5. Most of these American poets pushing and hustling their talents playing at greatness. poet (?): that word needs re- defining. when I hear that word I get a rising in the gut as if I were about to puke. let them have the stage so long as I need not be in the audience.
Charles Bukowski
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Molecules are moving. Universes are colliding. Generations are being born and dying simultaneously, throughout eternity. As one of our great American poets, Walt Whitman, once said: "I contain multitudes."
Frederick Lenz
#9. I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.
Charles Olson
#10. 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
#11. I think a lot of American poets are swimming-pool Soviets. A lot of them have taken the comfortable, self-protective route too often. I know that I certainly have. That's easy to do.
Sam Hamill
#13. H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.
Ben Hecht
#14. But nothing will ever change if we keep pretend. People 'live out loud', as you say, not merely for themselves but for a more honest future.
Jax Garren
#15. Everyone is drinking. She can feel them out there drinking, turning into beasts.
Anna Keesey
#16. You're at your most purest, most innocent, pure state when you're doing something you've never done before. You're scared a little, you're a little vulnerable, you're kind of trying, and then you're also better, because you're trying harder than you maybe would try.
Alicia Keys
#17. Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.
Aberjhani
#18. Jacob Thorke. My label, but not the description of a person. The prints are the most permanent thing about me.
Scott Kelly
#19. Nobody can tell you if what you're doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.
Hugh MacLeod
#20. The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
George Bernard Shaw
#21. I think that the voters should choose the elected officials, not the elected officials choose the voters.
Alan Grayson
#22. 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
#24. Domesticity is essentially drama, for drama is conflict, and the home compels conflict by its concentration of active personalities in a small area. The real objection to domesticity is that it is too exciting.
Rebecca West
#25. 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
#26. Eugenio Montale - born in Genoa in 1896, died in Milan, 1981 - is one of the twentieth-century Europeans who has spoken most meaningfully to American and British poets.
Jonathan Galassi
#27. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
#28. 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
#29. STUFF POETS STILL LIKE: POETRY
Amy King
#30. Man is preoccupied with freedom yet laden with handicaps. The breadth of his activity and experience is narrowed by the limitations of his relatively weak, sluggish body. The racehorse, by virtue of his awesome physical gifts, freed the jockey from himself.
Laura Hillenbrand
#31. What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. Rooms were sub-let, and sub-let again, so that what constituted a family had long been forgotten.
Sarah Perry
#32. Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer advantages.
Matthew Pearl
#33. The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth
along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets
have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.
Katy Lederer
#34. If sexual intercourse, as the poets tell us, began in 1963, it was another decade and a half before the American political system began to take notice.
Michael Kinsley
#35. 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
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