Top 55 Modern Poetry Quotes
#2. One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
Muriel Rukeyser
#3. The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.
Wendy Cope
#4. Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
Cyril Connolly
#5. There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.
Douglas Brinkley
#6. Over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about?
May Sarton
#7. The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser
#8. The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#9. While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.
David Antin
#10. The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Robert Morgan
#11. As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.
Ted Hughes
#12. A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
Walter Pater
#13. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#14. The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.
P. J. O'Rourke
#15. Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
W. H. Auden
#16. When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
J.G. Ballard
#17. Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.
John Betjeman
#18. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.
Virginia Woolf
#19. Neuere Poeten tun viel Wasser in die Tinte. (More recent poets put a lot of water in the ink.)
Goethe: Aus Makariens Archiv. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. III 18
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#20. The faint hints of color in her complexion, her tawny blond hair, her extraordinary thinness, all spoke of that unearthly grace modern poets find in the medieval statues. Had she been happy, she'd have been ravishing: happiness constitutes pure poetry, for women.
Honore De Balzac
#21. Why must ancients, and provided the same talent, be better than modern authors?
Free to exploit the vast realm of the simpleand the natural, they did not have to be artificial in order to be original (which every artist aspires to be).
Franz Grillparzer
#22. That we have ignored the lessons of modern war poetry speaks volumes to the lack of concern for that which we do not endure.
David McDonald
#23. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
#24. Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.
Robert Lowell
#25. I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart.
Philip Guston
#26. It is the unspecified 'you' of modern love poems that I am mostly concerned with here. At least, the addressee is commonly a lover, and the very fact that the name is withheld is offered as a guarantee of the closeness and significance of the relationship.
John Fuller
#27. I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
Randall Jarrell
#28. A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
Chaim Potok
#29. It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.
Karl Weierstrass
#30. Life goes on in the same manner,
evil wins and peace is slaughtered.
Change the channel, change the view,
tired of the same reruns on the evening news.
Susie Clevenger
#31. Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.
Beaumont Newhall
#32. High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
Diane Wakoski
#33. How pleasant a world would be in which no man was allowed to operate on the Stock Exchange unless he could pass and examination in economics and Greek poetry, and in which politicians were obliged to have a competent knowledge of history and modern novels.
Bertrand Russell
#34. Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
Terry Eagleton
#36. Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.
Victor Hugo
#37. THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD Experience Card's full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.
Orson Scott Card
#38. Like a speeding train
I am passing by...
I don't know
where I'm heading
with whom or why
all I know is that
I will never, ever
pass from here again
all I know is I'm skidding forward
on this track of life.
Sanober Khan
#39. You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
Robert Morgan
#40. We have the ability to be the Athens of modern times as opposed to the militaristic Sparta. I remind you that the Athenians wrote poetry. The Spartans did not.
Rita Mae Brown
#41. The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech ... For true poetry is never speech but always a song.
Herbert Read
#42. English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
James Fenton
#43. The way in which modern German poetry follows theories reminds me of pupils who, scolded by their teacher for their insubordination, justify themselves by saying that they invented new rules of propriety according to which they are quite well- behaved.
Franz Grillparzer
#44. All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
Denis Johnson
#45. Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
Octavio Paz
#46. With my ninth mind I resurrect my first
and dance slow to the music of my soul made new.
Aberjhani
#47. Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter ... the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing
John Milton
#48. Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
Helen Vendler
#49. I do not know much about gods;but I think that the river is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable ...
T. S. Eliot
#51. The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style ... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#52. It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
Lafcadio Hearn
#54. But the modern critic not only permits a false practice: he absolutely prescribes false aims." A true allegory of the state of one's mind in a representative history," the poet is told, "is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry.
Matthew Arnold
#55. I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
Sally Kirkland
