Top 100 Poetry Young Quotes
#1. He could guide anyone to the point of no return. He'd corral them with poetry, music, invoking the alcoholic gods that all died young. But we were so young, we didn't know we had anything we would miss.
Hannah Lillith Assadi
#2. Making it in poetry
The young teller
at the credit union
asked why so many
small checks
from universities?
Because I write
poems I said. Why
haven't I heard
of you? Because
I write poems
I said.
Bob Hicok
#3. Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,
epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#4. The poetry is the Earth, charming; The river, flowing from lofty mountains; Nature, a young woman and a heavenly plant with blossoming flowers, slinking in the garden of the mind.
Manmohan Acharya
#5. Ah, Valentine's Day. This Author personally detests the holiday. A girl must take the measure of her worth by the number of cards and bouquets she receives, and a young man is forced to spew poetry as if anyone actually spoke in rhyme. It's a wonder the holiday hasn't been
Julia Quinn
#6. The Major wished young men wouldn't think so much. It always seemed to result in absurd revolutionary movements or, as in the case of several of his former pupils, the production of very bad poetry.
Helen Simonson
#7. That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.
Li-Young Lee
#8. Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'
Mahmoud Darwish
#9. Poetry, gentle sir, is, as I take it, like a tender young maiden of supreme beauty, to array, bedeck, and adorn whom is the task of several other maidens,
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#10. You'll have to take me to some museums, he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry in his mind in diners and gas station men's rooms across the country.
Francesca Lia Block
#11. Because," said a boy.
"Because why?" asked a young girl.
"Because I love you.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#12. A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry.
D.H. Lawrence
#13. Do not write a poetry of rarity, or of rarification, but of *never again*.
Do not even write this poetry but find it, come across it, and step over it. The helpless ant that in the end can lift more than ten times its weight: that is a poetry.
Kevin Young
#14. Poetry is a way of always paying attention to the world for me; a way of letting the world stick to me instead of being anxious or estranged, just being present in the world.
Mike Young
#15. Logic has rid us of the absurdity of our clothes. That's progress, no irony, only now we are cold. Hale and ill trade bodies with unusual willingness, while in midair souls tangle. The young start out disgusted and Poetry is left to the memo-writers.
Odysseus Elytis
#16. Moonlight and high wind.
Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.
Li-Young Lee
#17. There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
Edward Young
#18. Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.
Michael Leunig
#19. However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.
Norman MacCaig
#20. In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.
Fanny Howe
#22. People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.
Li-Young Lee
#23. I am constantly torn between the will to be seen and still hidden so god damn well,
a contradiction I never figured out.
Charlotte Eriksson
#25. A door jumps
out from shadows,
then jumps away. This
is what I've come to find:
the back door, unlatched.
Tooled by insular wind, it
slams and slams
without meaning
to and without meaning.
Li-Young Lee
#26. Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.
Lady Gregory
#27. In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
Donald Hall
#28. We were fair game
but we have kept out of the cesspool.
We are strong.
We are the good ones.
Do not discover us
for we lie together all in green
like pond weeds.
Hold me, my young dear, hold me.
Anne Sexton
#29. The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
Robert Morgan
#30. She would remain forever young, forever noble, forever his blessedness, and not all the poetry in the world could express his devotion to her.
Sylvain Reynard
#31. Most events are inexpressible, and take place in a sphere that no word has ever entered. Most inexpressible of all are works of art, existences full of secrets whose life continues alongside ours, while ours is transitory.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#32. It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.
T. S. Eliot
#33. The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.
Wendell Berry
#34. Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
Jack Prelutsky
#35. More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.
Robert Frost
#36. Went looking for faith on the forest floor, and it showed up everywhere. In the sun, and the water, and the falling leaves, the falling leaves of time.
Neil Young
#37. A chestnut-haired child
Cheering up, went
and stood in his stall.
And took the whole incident
like a young colt -
and to live seemed worthwhile,
and to labor,
worthy.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
#38. Pain is an old friend who left briefly and has now returned. Starvation without sustenance, I had grown acquaint. Satiety was a stranger who invaded my deepest being, and now I cannot live without.
Melanie A. Gabbard
#39. Words, to me, are the same as an instrument is to a musician. I never know where this typewriter is going to take me until I begin. I never know what I'm feeling until I read over what I have written.
Tessa Emily Hall
#40. I want Poetry and Power and the young men who create it.
James Goldman
#41. I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
Robert Morgan
#42. Silver hidden in the gold,
Young man hidden in the old,
Laughing lord with weeping eyes,
Bring king and ring before sunrise!
-Hilarion, The Great and Terrible Quest
Margaret Lovett
#43. Poetry is the insistent roaring of the human soul.
Pietros Maneos
#44. Don't be afraid of Pain. Pain only comes down to a certain point... beyond that, it can't reach you and the love you have inside.
Eeva Lancaster
#45. I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.
Peter Meinke
#46. The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.
Anthony Powell
#47. When I was young, I reached a point where I found myself unable to pray. I was devastated by it. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry.
Mary Szybist
#48. Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.
Li-Young Lee
#49. Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life,
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality, which brings
To the delirious eye, more lovely things
Of Paradise and Love- and all our own!
Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.
Edgar Allan Poe
#50. 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
#51. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#52. Never miss a minute to Sexercise your mind!
Xia Devore
#53. When you're writing fiction or poetry ... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing ... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
Raymond Carver
#54. My mother wrote poetry when I was young - I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter - and my father told me inventive bedtime stories.
Eula Biss
#55. It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso
Patsy Asuncion
#56. The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.
Rabindranath Tagore
#57. When their voices didn't reach my ears,
I rebelled against my own skin
too young to realize that without their
stories I would starve.
Kiana Davis
#58. 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
#59. Poverty of young men alone behind the
stairways, who practice
alchemy inside bottle caps, who know
the altruism of a last syringe.
Jim Carroll
#60. I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
Marguerite Young
#61. We suffer each other to have each other a while.
Li-Young Lee
#62. When I try to achieve greatness, it spits on me the night before.
Monroe Ariel
#63. All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people - a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it - big questions.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#64. Not sorry, not calling, not crying
All will pass like smoke of white apple trees
Seized by the gold of autumn,
I will no longer be young.
Sergei Yesenin
#66. Let only the young come,
Says the sea.
Let them kiss my face
And hear me.
I am the last word
And I tell
Where storms and stars come from.
Carl Sandburg
#67. No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.
Knut Hamsun
#68. As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
#69. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out in my mind as the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves. Marguerite Young has added epic grandeur to the philosophical novel. Every page gleams with the poetry of existence.
Nona Balakian
#71. My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.
Li-Young Lee
#72. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
Virginia Woolf
#73. A man can be old and a fool
many are
a man can be young and wise
few are
Charles Bukowski
#74. You are the Worst Kind of Animal. A Butcher by Day and a Pussy Cat by Night.
Monroe Ariel
#75. I think no matter how snarky you try to be, poetry will always find a way to make a spiritual goal out of what you're doing.
Mike Young
#77. Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.
Li-Young Lee
#78. Hate blows a bubble of despair into
hugeness world system universe and bang
-fear buries a tomorrow under woe
and up comes yesterday most green and young
E. E. Cummings
#79. I hid my love when young till I
Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly;
I hid my life to my despite
Till I could not bear to look at light:
I dare not gaze upon her face
But left her memory in each place;
Where'er I saw a wild flower lie
I kissed and bade my love good-bye.
John Clare
#80. In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?
Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Li-Young Lee
#81. The beautiful thing
about young love
is the truth
in our hearts
that it will last forever.
Atticus Poetry
#83. Poetry, Shakespeare and opera, are like mumps and should be caught when young. In the unhappy event that there is a postponement to mature years, the results may be devastating.
Dimitris Mita
#84. Poetry is best written with the growl and the gut. The heart and the head should be the realm to the reader.
Jeremy Young
#85. When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
Billy Collins
#86. What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
Stephen Greenblatt
#87. You bend the nail
But keep hammering because
Hammering makes the world
Dean Young
#88. I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.
Jeffery Deaver
#89. Advice to Young Poets
Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head.
Martin Espada
#90. If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
Roger McGough
#91. A young gratuitous smile; trust and distrust;
Promiscuities of bed and board and road;
The one assured treasure
A life, in recollection, truly possessed.
Robert Wells
#92. 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
#93. Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.
Junot Diaz
#94. She was born of space.
And starlight.
But she bled wrath.
And vengeance.."
[From Current Work In Progress]
Jenna Streety
#95. 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
#96. She knew the intensity of adolescence, and knew no cure for it except growing up. And then one has age and experience, and mourns the loss of intensity. Maybe it's why musicians and mathmaticians are said to peak young-poetry needs the fire of an unbounded universe.
Sara Paretsky
#97. Lollypop
... the passion contained merely kisses
placed upon lips, neck and cheek
these young lovers of the castle
of which our fairytale speaks ...
Muse
#98. Because Dad told you he'd be here forever.
Because I thought forever was like Mars -- far away.
Kwame Alexander
#99. All poetry is political, to some degree.
Mike Young
#100. If anxiety is the major force of our contemporary condition, a lot of poetry - including my own, mostly - sort of tries to escape that, fly off into magical thinking or bewilderment or whatever.
Mike Young
