Top 44 Beat Poetry Quotes
#1. I've got feathers in my hair,
I get down to beat poetry.
Lana Del Rey
#2. I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.
Simon Rich
#3. I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music.
Oscar Hijuelos
#4. From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
Allen Ginsberg
#5. There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this produces a true barrier.
Lenore Kandel
#6. If there is passion, let me feel its heat.
I want my heart to beat fast,
my breath raspy, my skin to burn.
Susie Clevenger
#7. A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters
Julio Cortazar
#8. Git'er Done
They beat their swords upon their shields
To no beast or man would they yield
Muse
#9. Whatever is language is poetic language and if the word required by the poet does not exist in his known language then it is up to him to discover it.
Lenore Kandel
#10. Come on cats, let's go.
Let's teach those old dog cheap trick beatniks some new kicks and bottle up and blow.
Harry Whitewolf
#11. I eat a catfish sandwich
with onions and red sauce
20c. (Havana 1953)
Allen Ginsberg
#13. I write poetry, and I put it to a beat - I mean, that's what they call rap.
Keith Stanfield
#15. Euphemisms chosen by fear are a covenant with hypocrisy and will immediately destroy the poem and eventually destroy the poet.
Lenore Kandel
#16. Poetry without words, you are, the beat to my hearts rhythm.
N'Zuri Za Austin
#17. Poetry is alive because it is a medium of vision and experience.
It is not necessarily comfortable.
It is not necessarily safe.
Lenore Kandel
#18. What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.
Elizabeth Smart
#19. Unquestioning automatons
blindly marching to the beat -
an eerie crunching sound
hoards of shuffling feet ...
(from silent moments)
Muse
#20. Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
Allen Ginsberg
#21. He asked me for a light to light his cigarette, and by reason of unaware, it is he that really gave light to me, made me realize how much alike we all are, breathing the same air, beating the same red blood, separated through some fortune and shame in the way of humanity.
Anthony Liccione
#22. Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.
Macklemore
#23. Yet this thou art alive, but if ye soar,
My poor frail heart will have beat out its cry
And sadly miss thy sweet form all the more
While helplessly I stand and watch you die.
Timothy Salter
#24. We are the instruments of genius, yet more the rhythm and less the drum as each expanding beat arises.
Heather K. O'Hara
#25. The machines are too dull when we
are lion-poems that move & breathe.
Michael McClure
#27. I think of New York City lost in stars
forgotten as a blue haired pet of childhood love
Tonight the night is full;
Gregory Corso
#28. Poets are Prisoners
8-29-2015
Poets are prisoners
Practitioners, commissioners &
conditioners of the spoken word
Caged by their own minds
Words are shackles
Debbie Tosun Kilday
#29. 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
#30. I thought of rhyme alone,
For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble
And make the daylight sweet once more ...
William Butler Yeats
#31. One fine day, in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other. They pulled out their swords and shot one another. One deaf cop, on the beat heard the noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.
Holly Black
#32. If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.
Brad Leithauser
#33. I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.
Francesca Lia Block
#34. 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
#36. Maybe I should stop while I'm ahead
Nay, I swim with sea-demons
no sweet summer tuned radio
over my sunless desertscape
how does it burn without the sun?
Moonshine Noire
#37. In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.
Archie Shepp
#38. Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
T. S. Eliot
#39. As a romantic ideal, turbulent, impoverished India could still weave its spell, and the key to it all - the colours, the moods, the scents, the subtle, mysterious light, the poetry, the heightened expectations, the kind of beauty that made your heart miss a beat - well, that remained the monsoon.
Alexander Frater
#40. Let the wet earth embrace you firmly, soundly.
She needs to be revived, she needs to beat like a heart
full of adrenaline inside a chest.
V.S. Atbay
#41. Sing, of delight drink deep,
Drain spring by cups, not by thimbles.
Heart step up your beat!
Our breasts be the brass of cymbals.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
#42. I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
Ric Ocasek
#43. There have been so many times
i have seen a man wanting to weep
but
instead
beat his heart until it was unconscious.
Nayyirah Waheed
#44. If ever I was meant to love, my heart would beat for you,"
Need not the Raven say to Crow beneath the winter's howl.
Excerpt from "The Raven and The Crow
Angela B. Chrysler
