Top 100 Old Poetry Sayings
#1. She tasted of coffee and day old poetry.
R. YS Perez
#2. All the old poetry makes sense when you look at one whom you have loved.
Anne Rice
#3. Following dark winter's strife, a warm air rises, teemed with life. Birth, rebirth, as the waiting die. Old love, new love sprouts wings to fly.
Phar West Nagle
#4. He looked like a butler dressed by his four-year-old daughter - a mishmash of good intentions and ill design. And there I was, an unshaven, rumpled page of discarded poetry, extending a hand and smiling, no doubt wolfishly.
Walter Mosley
#5. A man can be old and a fool
many are
a man can be young and wise
few are
Charles Bukowski
#6. I wanna make growing old with you
the last poem I ever have to write
Michael Biondi
#7. Rejoice, Florence, seeing you are so great that over sea and land you flap your wings, and your name is widely known in Hell!
Dante Alighieri
#8. 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
#10. My grandmother
had no time for old,
no matter how her face crinkled
or her days folded like an apron around
her middle.
April Michelle Bratten
#11. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf
#12. Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings.
Robert James Waller
#13. I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.
Elizabeth Edwards
#15. We fall into the old stuff of textuality, and almost everything becomes safe because nobody wants to talk about what is not safe in poetry. We fall back on the psychologic, the ethnic, the quota, and serve the perpetuation of the machine.
Fady Joudah
#16. I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.
Ezra Pound
#17. People are laughing at me today for having holes in my pockets, and ink blood on my fingers-
a thirty-something old writer, who strangles words from dictionaries, and feeds on the decay of poetry.
Anthony Liccione
#19. I aspire to be
an old man
with an old wife
laughing at old jokes
from a wild youth.
Atticus Poetry
#20. There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.
Lafcadio Hearn
#22. True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.
Sophie Swetchine
#23. Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#24. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.
Paul Kingsnorth
#25. What is a woman that you forsake her
And the hearth fire and the home acre
To go with that old grey widow-maker?
Rudyard Kipling
#26. 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
#28. As for poetry 'belonging' in the classroom, it's like the way they taught us sex in those old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If it I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk; & if I had taken college English seriously, I would have become an accountant.
Jerome Rothenberg
#29. 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
#30. I spent the rest of that day brainstorming. How do you catch a very old, very alert tiger by surprise? Use his weaknesses: food, feminine wiles, poetry, and over-protectiveness. The poor guy didn't stand a chance.
Colleen Houck
#31. The past is useless
to me now:
an old suitcase
with mould in the lining,
heavy even when empty.
Robyn Sarah
#32. I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
Diane Wakoski
#33. I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire, which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended with smoke: but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.
Lord Chesterfield
#34. Quiet Prayer:
As long as the sun shall rise goes the old lovers vow. But we are children of a scientific age & have no time for poetry. Still, I offer a quiet prayer of thanks for the sunlight each time I see your face.
Brian Andreas
#35. My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Thom Gunn
#36. We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones
have taken away the light of their presence ...
Denise Levertov
#37. When all the world is old, lad, And all the trees are brown; And all the sport is stale, lad, And all the wheels run down, Creep home and take your place there, The spent and maimed among: God grant you find one face there You loved when all was young.
Susanna Kearsley
#38. There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way.
Saul Bellow
#39. 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
#40. I started writing poetry and philosophy when I was 17 years old and my mind so was wild. Now I'm 56 and I often want to write like a child.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#41. Who could have foretold
the heart grows old
from touching others
Leonard Cohen
#42. There's too much risk in loving,'
the young boy said,
'no,'
said the old man,
'there's too much risk in not.
Atticus Poetry
#43. The bear and I --
we rise like a windstorm
to witness these old trees talk.
Vivian Demuth
#44. From all my dreams where you felt everlasting
to all my clothes your words used to wear,
to the old end, to the new beginning,
you have lost me everywhere.
Khadija Rupa
#45. I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn't write
swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship
and drifted away at last through the night sky.
Tomas Transtromer
#46. All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.
Joseph Campbell
#47. Take what the old-church
found in Mithra's tomb,
candle and script and bell,
take what the new-church spat upon
and broke and shattered.
Hilda Doolittle
#48. Maybe I should just lie quietly inside you while our old selves slip in and out of the back rooms of the soul.
Richard Jackson
#49. Honor Lost
Ambulant sunshine pierced
the soot covered glass ~
the feeble man wandered by
in this ritual morning pass ...
Muse
#50. This autumn-
why am I growing old?
bird disappearing among clouds.
Matsuo Basho
#51. An old liar told me here
To think ahead and save my money.
I should have spent it on ribbons.
I should have learned the tune my dead grandfather played
When the daft wife heard him resounding
In the deep pine woods in early November.
Menzies McKillop
#53. Old McDonald had a restaurant,
E, I, E, I, O,
And in that restaurant was some beef,
E, I, E, I, O,
With a moo moo here,
And a moo moo there.
Here a moo, there a moo,
Everywhere a moo moo cholesterol filled death trap burger.
Harry Whitewolf
#54. Breezy days
deserve the union
of two old friends.
Sanober Khan
#55. Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago.
William Wordsworth
#56. When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
Denis Diderot
#57. At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd
Walt Whitman
#58. We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
Robert Lowell
#59. To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey'd,
Such seems your beauty still.
William Shakespeare
#60. The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.
Christopher Morley
#61. I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.
Maya Angelou
#62. When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
W.B.Yeats
#63. As a filmmaker coming from one of the youngest lands in the world, New Zealand - safe, green and democratic - I was intrigued by Afghanistan, with its literature and poetry, its old land and its deep history.
Pietra Brettkelly
#64. I like cups of tea and reading books and poetry and old people things.
Bindi Irwin
#65. Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
May Sarton
#66. Books measure time in both moments and years.
We all grow old but the stories never will.
R.M. Engelhardt
#67. I began to write poetry when I was about four years old. In other words, I've always been writing poetry.
Ernesto Cardenal
#68. All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking
Robert Hass
#69. We love fog because
it shifts old anomalies into the elements
surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
Eavan Boland
#71. This rootless shifting east and west
I can't suppress a smile myself
but how else can I make
the whole world my home.
If any of my old friends
come around asking
say I'm down at the river
by the Second Fushimi Bridge.
Baisao
#72. To me, Doors fans were always the 16-year-old idiots at parties, getting stoned, and talking about how Morrison's lyrics were like poetry ... like that was a deep thought.
Bruce McCulloch
#73. Recently I've been dreaming
of cursing old people
with little provocation,
because their culture
has a long history of enslaving,
raping, and segregating,
and they have special lights
which prevent us from dancing.
Matthew Rohrer
#74. 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
#75. Reflections they give me
That my mirror does not
They know the new me
Not the old me
That I am not
Kathleen Marie
#76. There was an old man of St. Bees,
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp;
When they asked, "Does it hurt?"
He replied, "No, it doesn't,
But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet.
W.S. Gilbert
#77. Poetry affords us a respite in which we may gather renewed strength for the old struggle to adapt ourselves to reality.
Robert Haven Schauffler
#78. If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.
Annie Dillard
#79. Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.
James Crumley
#80. The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.
Joy Harjo
#81. There's in my mind a ...
turbulent moon-ridden girl
or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers
and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs
but she is not kind.
Denise Levertov
#82. 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
#83. Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings - stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.
Greg Bear
#85. It was the furthest thing in the world from the rosy-fingered dawn of poetry and old Technicolor movies; this was an anti-dawn, damp and as pale as the cheek of a day-old corpse.
Stephen King
#86. 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
#87. From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me.
Dejan Stojanovic
#88. 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
#89. And when I feel
the masks beneath
crumble and fade with
time I build new ones
to replace the old.
"Masks"- Sins Within
Shay Leigh
#90. Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds
Along the pebbled shore of memory!
Many old rotten-timber'd boats there be
Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified
To goodly vessels; many a sail of pride,
And golden keel'd, is left unlaunch'd and dry.
John Keats
#91. Reporters heard words but not poetry, saw old politicians but not new heroes.
David Pietrusza
#92. If you find that the reader of popular romances
however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances
goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.
C.S. Lewis
#93. Refuse the old means of measurement.
Rely instead on the thrumming wilderness of self. Listen.
-From "Out West
Donika Kelly
#94. The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
Adrienne Rich
#95. Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
Stanley Kunitz
#96. Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
Jack Prelutsky
#97. There is an old Latin quotation in regard to the poet which says 'Poeta nascitur non fit' the translation of which is - the poet is born, not made.
Joseph Devlin
#98. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#99. Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.
Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.
Joyce Cary
#100. I hope for a light grief in old age.
I was born in Rome and it has returned to me.
My autumn was a kind of she-wolf,
And August - the month of Caesars - smiled at me.
Osip Mandelstam
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