Top 50 Poetry Is Not Dead Quotes
#1. I know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost; nor has Mammon gained power over either, to bind or slay: they will both assert their existence, their presence, their liberty and strength again one day.
Charlotte Bronte
#2. Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead.
Maltbie Davenport Babcock
#3. The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a metaphor, let alone a tender feeling, is on of the more obtuse critical platitudes of our time.
Terry Eagleton
#4. And I am weary of the anguish
Increasing winters bear;
Weary to watch the spirit languish
Through years of dead despair.
So, if a tear, when thou art dying,
Should haply fall from me,
It is but that my soul is sighing,
To go and rest with thee.
Emily Bronte
#5. A lot we have in our head,
But things of heart are not yet dead,
They have done none, but just fled,
Out of us, Forgotten, just been bled..
Numey
#7. Latin is a dead tongue
And Romans made songs!
Then no one disagree:
It delighted them in theory
Now it's "the Latin" in me.
Ana Claudia Antunes
#9. I thought my fireplace dead
and stirred the ashes.
I burned my fingers.
Antonio Machado
#11. I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
James Laughlin
#12. But it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it ...
Frank O'Hara
#13. April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
T. S. Eliot
#14. One of the rules of Greek lament poetry is that it mustn't mention the dead by name in case of invoking a ghost. Maybe the 'Iliad,' crowded with names, is more than a poem. Maybe it's a dangerous piece of the brightness of both this world and the next.
Alice Oswald
#15. The dead" we say as if speaking
of "the people" who
gave up on making history
simply to get through
Something dense and null groan
without echo underground
and owl-voiced I cry Who
are these dead people these
lovers who if ever did
listen no longer answer
: We :
Adrienne Rich
#16. - so much like riding dangerous women
with whiskey coloured eyes -
such women as once fell dead with their lovers
with fire in their heads and slippery froth on thighs
Al Purdy
#17. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T. S. Eliot
#18. It's hot tonight and half the neighborhood is drunk. the other half is dead. if I have any advice about writing poetry it's - don't. I'm going to send out for some fried chicken.
Charles Bukowski
#19. What did you expect? That he'd send you flowers and write you bad poetry? That dead Nemean prowler is pretty much as close to a stuffed animal as you're ever going to get from a Spartan like Logan Quinn.
Jennifer Estep
#20. What's the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don't think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that's who my audience is, I'm dead, I'm not going to make any money.
Harley King
#21. Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
Seamus Heaney
#22. I kept you so well, buried beneath the darkest shame and stilled with filthy lies. Perhaps I should have dug deeper.
Nicole Lyons
#23. Try to be thoughtful,
don't make the poor man say it;
see how human he is,
he has children of his own,
it is your job to ask:
Is she dead?
And he will nod and say yes
And now he can never not nod.
And now he can never say no.
And now he can never not say
yes.
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno
#24. ASK NOT IF POETRY IS DEAD, ASK HOW YOU CAN LIVE FOR POETRY.
Amy King
#25. Ah, Lalage! while life is ours,
Hoard not thy beauty rose and white,
But pluck the pretty fleeing flowers
That deck our little path of light:
For all too soon we twain shall tread
The bitter pastures of the dead:
Estranged, sad spectres of the night.
Ernest Dowson
#26. The match I struck shall not run dead
You're my first inhale, my last cigarette.
Mie Hansson
#27. I've been told by many the art of poetry's dead, I believe it's alive on pages they haven't read
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#28. I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.
Wanda Lea Brayton
#30. I travel the broad path as is the way of youth, I give myself to vice unmindful of virtue, I am eager for the pleasure of the flesh more than salvation, my soul is dead and I shall look after the flesh.
Carl Orff
#31. Cotton rows crisscross the world
And dead-tired nights of yearning
Thunderbolts on leather strops
And all my body burning
Sugar cane reach up to God
And every baby crying
Shame a blanket of my night
And all my days are dying
Maya Angelou
#32. I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
Robert Hass
#35. 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
#36. Better off dead than giving in; not taking what you want.
Carol Ann Duffy
#37. But from here on
I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening
-from A Woman Dead in Her Forties
Adrienne Rich
#38. I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still
writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time.
Margaret Atwood
#40. So sing, you birds
for the fever is about to rise
and the empty stalemate is over
let the colors bleed back into you
and let the dead be buried for another year.
from let the colors bleed
K.R. Albers
#41. Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street ... Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.
Wassily Kandinsky
#42. They say, poetry is dead. I say, was there ever a time they had a clue of what the state of poetry is?
Jason E. Hodges
#43. A billion stars go spinning through the night, / glittering above your head, / But in you is the presence that will be / when all the stars are dead.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#44. 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
#45. The will of life and death,
never share the same motivation ...
we all know that love is the ultimate motive to die for ...
but let's not kid ourselves ...
... we all know the ultimate motive to rise back from the dead is vengeance.
Non Nomen
#47. The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
Robert Morgan
#48. the song of the dead
heavy as rain
on the wide banana leaves
hard as drums
Antonio Cisneros
#49. 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
#50. The poetry of earth is never dead When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide I cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.
John Keats
