Top 44 Old Poem Quotes
#2. Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he's a high-handed old poem himself, but he's also sublime - and who goes to poetry for safety anyway.
Reginald Horace Blyth
#3. The horse-shoe nail. Remember the old poem? 'For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of the shoe the horse was lost. For want of the horse the rider was lost. For want -
Philip K. Dick
#4. Every old poem is sacred.
Horace
#5. For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling vaguely guilty.
William S. Burroughs
#6. But I am wise if not yet quite old, wanting the poem more than the lover, wanting words more than the sticky dew men secrete in their private places.
Erica Jong
#7. Paradise Lost is a poem. The old, blind bastard's trying to sing to you. Listen, as the Isley Brothers say, to the music. You must learn to do that before you can expect to understand. Slowly. Slowly. A few licks at a time.
John Edgar Wideman
#8. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill ...
Ian McEwan
#9. The Cloudy Vase
Past time, I threw the flowers out,
washed out the cloudy vase.
How easily the old clearness
leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it.
Jane Hirshfield
#10. I wrote something when I was 9 that seemed pretty good for a 9 year old; it concerned flowers in our family garden - I was grateful my mother praised it. Of course, I found out later it was pretty silly, but it was the first poem I was proud of.
Brenda Hillman
#11. The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
Marguerite Young
#12. With Cosette's garter, Homer would make the Iliad. He would put into his poem an old babbler like me, and he would call him Nestor.
Victor Hugo
#13. But always and sometimes questioning the old modes
And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor,
Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual
Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now,
Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.
John Ashbery
#14. I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
From the poem Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath
#15. Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master ... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
Charles Bukowski
#16. When you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
it's just
a pair of shoes
without
anybody
in them
and
just as
well.
Charles Bukowski
#17. Let me also say I wanna make you sandwhiches,
And soup,
And peanut butter cookies,
Though, the truth is peanutbutter is actually really bad for you 'cause they grow peanuts in old cotton fields to clean the toxins out of the soil,
But hey, you like peanutbutter and I like you!
Andrea Gibson
#18. The first time I got onstage was when I was about 5 years old. It was at a church social, and I had a poem to recite.
Willie Nelson
#19. Bucket
I feel so dreamy
dreamy lazy, crazy sleepy
like I want to be there
in the doorway, the doorway
or the porch corner
be sitting, be empty
notdoing not going
an old bucket left there
in the porch corner is like I am
an old empty bucket somebody left there.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#20. When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves - I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.
Alicia Silverstone
#21. Growing older is a blurred birth certificate that only can take us to this world's perplexed journey, but it cannot smear the letters of the epitaph
Munia Khan
#22. Ashryver eyes.
The fairest eyes, from legends old
of brightest, ringed with gold.
Sarah J. Maas
#23. For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.
Tennessee Williams
#24. He should have told Vlad that in the old days a collection of poems could change your life, but a single poem could also cost the life of its author.
Andrei Makine
#25. That poem is so damned long. You'd think old Walt could have taken a line or two to tell us how to unscrew the door from its jamb.
John Green
#26. I wanna make growing old with you
the last poem I ever have to write
Michael Biondi
#27. Parting
One is strong, a child now grown
The other weak, a parent aged
-
The strong once feeble
The weak once mighty
-
Time, the infinity
has marked them ...
Muse
#28. Haunt an old house.
Ask for a treat.
Laugh like a witch.
Lick something sweet.
Offer a trick.
Wander a maze.
Echo a boo.
Exclaim the phrase
Normal's unnatural on Halloween!
Richelle E. Goodrich
#30. When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car
See me.
Randall Jarrell
#31. Fire burns blue and hot.
Its fair light blinds me not.
Smell of smoke is satisfying, tastes nourishing to my tongue.
I think fire ageless, never old, and yet no longer young.
Morning coals are cool: daylight leaves me blind.
I love the fire most because of what it leaves behind.
Penny Reid
#32. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.
Jane Hirshfield
#33. Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, - knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
Wilfred Owen
#34. Every morning
before the birds start
trilling me their stories,
I give birth to a new love
through my same old heart
when a lake's placidity
finds life in the swans breath
Only for you...
From the poem 'Only For You
Munia Khan
#35. Youth's lost companion may be the measured friend of old age, I hope", said Daniel. "I may write a poem on the subject."
"Dear God, it sounds more like a cross-stitched pillow than a poem," said Hugh.
Helen Simonson
#36. We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
Julie Taymor
#37. There is an old saying "well begun is half done" - 'tis a bad one. I would use instead, "Not begun at all till half done;" so according to that I have not begun my Poem and consequently (a priori) can say nothing about it.
John Keats
#38. I walk through the old yellow sunlight
to get to my kitchen table
the poem about me
lying there with the books
in which I am listed
among the dead and future Dylans
Leonard Cohen
#39. Honor Lost
Ambulant sunshine pierced
the soot covered glass ~
the feeble man wandered by
in this ritual morning pass ...
Muse
#40. From the beginning. I was a poem-writing child. I wrote little novels in my composition book when I was eight, nine years old.
Joan Larkin
#41. Depending on who I am talking about or who's talking through me - if the person is a kind of hip-hop, or rhythm and blues person, or if the person is a kind of old-fashion gothic, meaning gothic attitude, then that will determine what form the poem will take.
Maya Angelou
#42. The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.
Christopher Morley
#43. I'm old enough, by a long shot, to remember going to the library and spending days researching. If I was looking for a line from a poem or something else I needed, that would be the trip I would have to take.
Charlie Kaufman
#44. Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
May Sarton
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