Top 71 War Poetry Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
George Packer
#3. There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
Thom Gunn
#4. The poetry of heroism holds an irresistible appeal for people who aren't involved in a war, especially when they're making piles of money out of one.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#5. They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.
Dan Simmons
#6. The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#7. In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.
Virginia Woolf
#8. I was a bit shut down by a lot of the snarkiness and biliousness in some of the poetry blogs. I was tired of aesthetic wars that weren't productive and were becoming mean-spirited. I was probably overworked as well, so I stopped reading and writing for about a year.
Simone Muench
#9. Care: not carnage
Love: not loathing
Peace: not pieces
Maddy Kobar
#10. The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking
Marvin Bell
#11. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#12. Poetry, is a life long war waged
against ineffable beauty.
Atticus Poetry
#13. No matter how long you behest, to the fruit draped tree.
It will do you no best, until a shingle you free.
Shahzad Ashraf
#14. We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser
#15. Death is buried there into death
Hunger strikes on its own last breath
No spine to shiver, no heart talks
At life's craving poverty mocks
From the poem 'Exhumation
Munia Khan
#16. That your power of command
with simple language was
one of the magnificent things of
our century.
(from the poem: result)
Charles Bukowski
#18. Still may syllables jar with time,
Still may reason war with rhyme,
Resting never!
Ben Jonson
#19. There is a war
in your name
I have martyred you
sold you
to freedom
oh, Freedom
Banoo Zan
#20. Perhaps there never was a monument more characteristic of an age and people than the Alhambra; a rugged fortress without, a voluptuous palace within; war frowning from its battlements; poetry breathing throughout the fairy architecture of its halls.
Washington Irving
#21. When humankind possesses enormous new powers, and when the threat of famine, plague and war is finally lifted, what will we do with ourselves? What will the scientists, investors, bankers and presidents do all day? Write poetry? Success
Yuval Noah Harari
#22. After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all.
Kurt Vonnegut
#23. In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
Seamus Heaney
#24. Fear of joy is the darkest of captivities.
Phil Kaye
#25. Every sword that was dripping the blood became a pen. Every word that was written in it became a poetry.
Akshay Vasu
#26. All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.
Joy Harjo
#27. My heart was full of softening showers,
I used to swing like this for hours,
I did not care for war or death,
I was glad to draw my breath.
Stevie Smith
#28. If freedom is free and none need worry, then what blood drops for thee?
Ryan Goodrich
#30. Mute in that golden silence hung with green,
Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes
Remembrance of all beauty that has been,
And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
Siegfried Sassoon
#31. There was a war all over the world
and all over the world
was grief.
And yet I whispered into jewelled ears
verses of love.
It makes me feel ashamed.
But no, not really.
Jaroslav Seifert
#32. My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.
James Fenton
#33. It comes down to this: we're pieces of equipment
To be counted and signed for.
On occasion some of us break down,
And those parts which can't be salvaged
Are replaced with other GI parts, that's all.
Rolando Hinojosa
#34. I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.
Donald Hall
#35. Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.
Steven Erikson
#36. It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
James Fenton
#37. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.
Tyrtaeus
#38. There will be miracles After the last war is won Science and poetry rule in the new world to come Prophets and angels Gave us the power to see What an amazing future there will be
Billy Joel
#39. I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music.
John Quincy Adams
#40. You read a hundred
military manuals you won't
find the word kill they trick
you into killing.
Anne Carson
#41. Loving someone who hates
themselves
is a special kind of violence.
A fight inside the bones.
A war within the blood.
Yrsa Daley-Ward
#42. It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso
Patsy Asuncion
#44. Walking away ends a battle in the heart of one,
and starts a war in the soul of another.
Jenim Dibie
#45. I am waiting for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe for anarchy
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#46. Youth must its ignorant impulse lend--
Age finds place in the rear.
All wars are boyish and are fought by boys
Herman Melville
#47. The words 'I Love You' kill, and resurrect millions, in less than a second.
Aberjhani
#48. Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
Antonin Artaud
#49. Contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.
Nick Hornby
#50. I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
Kenneth Koch
#51. A person who wants a pure and simple life can start a war within themselves and with society
Lisa C. Miller
#52. They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.
Howard Zinn
#53. I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can't say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets.
Luc Delahaye
#54. Your war drum ain't / louder than this breath.
Suheir Hammad
#55. The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.
Robert Hass
#56. In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.
Aberjhani
#57. I must study war and politics so that my children shall be free to study commerce, agriculture and other practicalities, so that their children can study painting, poetry and other fine things.
John Adams
#58. A compelling and important story of First Word War Scotland, a time when women redefined the word hope as the world was losing its innocence. Andrea MacPherson writes beautifully, balancing the lives of her characters between history and the poetry of gesture, secrets and love.
Ami McKay
#59. September 11, 2001: Citizens of the U.S., besieged by terror's sting,
rose up, weeping glory, as if on eagles' wings.
from the poem Angel of Remembrance: Candles for September 11, 2001
Aberjhani
#60. In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace.
Aberjhani
#61. I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
Joe Haldeman
#62. As long as they let me just talk to the kids, about stuff like, I don't know, knife usage, field medicine for beginners. How to make the night sky your ally, with the Big Dipper a place to hang your hat, and Orion your friend to guide you home. That's what I would have wanted to hear, back then ...
Terry Pratchett
#64. If poetry could truly tell it backwards, then it would.
Carol Ann Duffy
#65. No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell's Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft.
Tom Robbins
#66. Th' unconquerable will,/ And study of revenge, immortal hate,/ And courage never to submit or yield/ And what is else not to be overcome?
John Milton
#67. On faith's battered back calm eyes etch prayers that cool a nation's hot rage.
Aberjhani
#68. I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.
Walter Dean Myers
#69. Honor Lost
Ambulant sunshine pierced
the soot covered glass ~
the feeble man wandered by
in this ritual morning pass ...
Muse
#70. If we knew how to find
the lost, we would know
how to rediscover
the parts of our minds
left behind
in battle.
Margarita Engle
#71. Before now poetry has taken notice
Of wars, and what are wars but politics
Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?
Robert Frost
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