Poetry Young Quotes & Sayings

This is the hour I hide everything
Behind my eyes
To see if you can see
All the trouble my brain's been brewing.
Yes, I feel I am the worst and you are the best
And yet, and yet,
Nothing bad unfolds as we sit,
Young and nervous,
Alive and bursting,
With futures that may not entwine.
Who am I?
Who am I to sabotage what may be too small
For even chaos to notice
And disassemble? — Evan Roskos

Never miss a minute to Sexercise your mind! — Xia Devore

As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, 'I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure. — Julia Alvarez

And you might try to hide or protect yourself, or compare the different states of love,
but you must not grow up, must not act wise
when it comes to love.
You must stay foolish and fall
for every heart will beat in different ways together with yours and love is not meant to be compared, only enjoyed, and suffered, and remembered. — Charlotte Eriksson

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

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

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy. — Dean Young

Art is the heart's explosion on the world. Music. Dance. Poetry. Art on cars, on walls, on our skins. There is probably no more powerful force for change in this uncertain and crisis-ridden world than young people and their art. It is the consciousness of the world breaking away from the strangle grip of an archaic social order. — Luis J. Rodriguez

The Oak

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fall'n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength. — Alfred Tennyson

No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze ...
I wrote back telling Liza that her poems were bad and she ought to stop composing. Sometime later I saw her in another cafe, sitting at a long table, abloom and ablaze among a dozen young Russian poets. She kept her sapphire glance on me with a mocking and mysterious persistence. — Vladimir Nabokov

I am just coming from my visit to Japan, where I exhorted this young nation to take its stand upon the higher ideals of humanity and never to follow the West in its acceptance of the organized selfishness of Nationalism as its religion, never to gloat upon the feebleness of its neighbours, never to be unscrupulous in its behaviour to the weak, where it can be gloriously mean with impunity, while turning its right cheek of brighter humanity for the kiss of admiration to those who have the power to deal it a blow. Some of the newspapers praised my utterances for their poetical qualities, while adding with a leer that it was the poetry of a defeated people. I felt they were right. Japan had been taught in a modern school the lesson how to become powerful. The schooling is done and she must enjoy the fruits of her lessons. — Rabindranath Tagore

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I'm too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She's waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I'm eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I'm so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met? — F.K. Preston

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

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

I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music. And then there was old Felix M. with his "Midsummer Night's Dream" Overture. And there were others. And there was this like French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur, his first name. Eighteen was not all that young an age then. But what was I going to do? — Anthony Burgess

The library was a great sprawling complex with rolls and rolls of paper tucked into many shelves. Between the reading rooms were courtyards with living fountains and singing birds and butterflies that would transform into handsome young women to guide or entertain anyone who stayed there any length of time. I saw one among the stacks, explaining an older style of calligraphy to the newly appointed Heavenly Marine Official of the South China Sea. In another wing, a librarian stepped from her chrysalis for the first time, reciting T'ang Dynasty poetry to the flowers. That's how I knew I was in the right section. — Larissa Lai

Advice to Young Poets
Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head. — Martin Espada

In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice. — Li-Young Lee

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don't know and have compassion for them at the same time? — Wendell Berry

The poems turned up everywhere. Soon the lady of the house went into fits of hysteria when she kept discovering this attack of poetry in the most unlikely places - under doors, in the mother-of-pearl latticework of windowpanes, under jars, stones, flowerpots, loaves of bread, and even delivered by homing pigeons, around whose rose-coloured claws the young matador lovingly wound poems in which he declaimed his love in the quaint language whose provenance was unknown to the world and still evoked images of the uninterrupted empires of Visigiths, the unbridled lust of the Huns and the intransigence of the Berbers. The young maiden recognized only a few words, but to her they were fragments of a secret music: zirimiri, fine rain; senaremaztac, husband and wife; nik behar diren guzian eginen ditut, I shall do everything necessary ... — Eric Gamalinda

Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it's probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it's like to be that lobster in the pot, that's in poetry too. — Dean Young

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

It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso — Patsy Asuncion

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young," [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture - the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of 'the wild' from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. 'Deranging the senses' was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.

"Today," he continued, "the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity. — Peter Coyote

With you a part of me hath passed away;
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by this wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.
But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease,
And the dear honour of your amity;
For these once mine, my life is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be,
What I keep of you, or you rob from me. — George Santayana

One can't have literary comprehension without real experience, mere grammatical knowledge of the words is useless without recognition of their values, and when you young people want to understand a country and its language you should start by seeing it at its most beautiful, in the strength of its youth, at its most passionate. You should begin by hearing the language in the mouths of the poets who create and perfect it, you must have felt poetry warm and alive in your hearts before we smart anatomizing it. — Stefan Zweig

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

Few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed. — Stanley Kunitz

When I was around 19 years old, working in the college library, I was talking to a friend of mine and this older woman interrupted and said "You're too young to know about Billie Holiday." My response was "I'm too young to know about Shakespeare, too ... should I not read him? — Wanda Lea Brayton

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

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent. — Marguerite Young

I thought it such a shame that our culture had not devised a way to defang old age. A sophisticated civilization wouldn't ridicule senility, it would elevate it, worship it, wouldn't it? We would train ourselves to see poetry in the nonsense of dementia, to actually look forward to becoming so untethered from the world. We'd make a ceremony of casting off our material goods and confining ourselves to a single room, leaving all our old, abandoned space to someone new, someone young, so that we could die alone, indifferent to our own decay and lost beauty. (127 — Timothy Schaffert

A bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body
the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me. — Li-Young Lee

No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
"How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below."
I have to be gone for a season or so. — Robert Frost

An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity. — Eric Cantona

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

I remember a scared, young girl hiding in the guise of arrogance and rebellion. I remember feeling lost in a world where everyone else seemed to have it all figured out. I remember the tears of pain, the rants of anger and the hell that seemed to have swallowed me whole. Although I remember these things, it is now, over a decade later, more like a story that I find hard to believe. Did it all really happen? Even as I write this, my eyes begin to swell. It really did happen. I was that girl. And I'm sorry she had to suffer so. But, that is over now... — Karen Michelle Miller

Nutt was technically an expert on love poetry throughout the ages and had discussed it at length with Miss Healstether, the castle librarian. He had also tried to discuss it with Ladyship, but she had laughed and said it was frivolity, although quite helpful as a tutorial on the use of vocabulary, scansion, rhythm and affect as a means to an end, to wit getting a young lady to take all her clothes off. At that particular point, Nutt had not really understood what she meant. It sounded like some sort of conjuring trick. — Terry Pratchett

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

You bend the nail
But keep hammering because
Hammering makes the world — Dean Young

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

I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas. — Dennis Gabor

The extraordinary-looking pair of young people weren't holding hands, but the way they tilted ever so subtly toward each other made it clear that they didn't have to touch to feel the other. Even the air between them crackled with a kind of magnetism that had yet to be discovered by science, but that poets had been writing about since the dawn of time. — Josephine Angelini

We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides. What other creature in God's wide domain would carry the memory of you, Fanny, dust these nine hundred years, and allow it to eat away at him even as consumption does the same work with its effortless efficiency?
Words assail me. The thought of books makes me ache. Poetry echoes in my mind, and if I had the ability to banish it, I would do so at once. — Dan Simmons

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

I've always been a fan of comedy, and I understood from a young age that what makes most comedy work is the immediacy of first person experience. I'd spent a lot of time from 1995-1998 focusing almost exclusively on poetry, and it's an incredibly difficult form in which to achieve a sustained comic tone unless you're Alexander Pope. — Kevin Keck

Where is his father?
When will his mother be home?

How is he going to explain
the moon taken hostage, the sea
risen to fill up all the mirrors?

How is he going to explain the branches
beginning to grow from his ribs and throat,
the cries and trills starting in his own mouth?

And now that ancient sorrow between his hips,
his body's ripe listening;
the planet
knowing itself at last. — Li-Young Lee

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

I took him to the river and said "let's watch something drown," So he took a stone
and I took my necklace
and we threw it all together,
the way I always think I will get better in July. Things will change and sounds won't ache
and I gave my heart to uncertainty so many times, and so I took him to the river,
threw the necklace in the river to slowly watch it drown, or burn, or fade away
like I've done so many times. — Charlotte Eriksson

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

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

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

But in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,
no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden — Li-Young Lee

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

I'm back there again, broken from being a champion,
The boy that no one loved,
The years I spent training like a method actor to
Become the man that everyone admired,
But it means nothing,
Like ashes on a forehead, they marked me inferior,
When I was still young enough to receive it into the grain of my being — Terrence Alonzo Craft

I stood in your doorway this morning
dreaming you'd turn around
you'd tilt your head
you'd softly whisper "stay"

or that you'd grab my arms
to shake me while asking
what the hell are we doing
we love
each other
and this is not right
so we will make this work
now stay!

You poured your coffee. Stirred the spoon like a crystal man
with your back to me and not a sound. the fridge humming elegies while the clock ticked on
and the streets are so clean here people rushing to work
and maybe I should be too
by now
at this age
this stage
this town.

I will stand in that doorway
dreaming
for many nights to come. — Charlotte Eriksson

A lot of novelists start late - Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter. — James M. Cain

Dylan [Thomas] I knew before and after he became famous. He was splendid, rapacious, demanding as a young man. To much has been written about him for me to add to the legend. As that legend began to grow in his lifetime I learned to separate him from his poetry, to find him in person increasingly tedious and his poems increasingly exciting, both in print and when he was reading them. — John Pudney

Politics
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms! — W.B.Yeats

To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to discover that which is beyond the physical, to experience another life and another level of feeling. It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown. — Ai Weiwei

An oak tree and a rosebush grew,
Young and green together,
Talking the talk of growing things-
Wind and water and weather.
And while the rosebush sweetly bloomed
The oak tree grew so high
That now it spoke of newer things-
Eagles, mountain peaks and sky.
"I guess you think you're pretty great,"
The rose was heard to cry,
Screaming as loud as it possibly could
To the treetop in the sky.
"And now you have no time for flower talk,
Now that you've grown so tall."
"It's not so much that I've grown," said the tree,
"It's just that you've stayed so small. — Shel Silverstein

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them. — A.S. Byatt

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

Yes, he is here in this
open field, in sunlight, among
the few young trees set out
to modify the bare facts
he's here, but only
because we are here.
When we go, he goes with us
to be your hands that never
do violence, your eyes
that wonder, your lives
that daily praise life
by living it, by laughter.
He is never alone here,
never cold in the field of graves. — Denise Levertov

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

Beware women grown
old
who were never
anything but
young — Charles Bukowski

Whereas Taft discouraged the young Yale student from extracurricular reading, fearful it would detract from required courses, Roosevelt read widely yet managed to stand near the top of his class. The breath of his numerous interests allowed him to draw on knowledge across various disciplines, from zoology in philosophy and religion, from poetry and drama to history and politics. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find. — Edward Hirsch

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

All poetry is political, to some degree. — Mike Young

The young must grow old
Whilst old ones grow older.
And cowards will shrink
As the bold grow bolder.
Courage may blossom in quiet hearts,
For who can tell where bravery starts?
Truth is a song, oft lying unsung,
Some mother bird protecting her young.
Those who lay down their lives for friends,
The echo rolls onward, it seldom ends.
Who never turned and ran, but stayed?
This is a warrior, born, not made.
Living in peace, aye many a season,
Calm in life and sound in reason,
Till evil arrives, a wicked horde
Driving the warrior to pick up his sword
The challenger rings then, straight and fair,
Justice is with us, beware, beware. — Brian Jacques

Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming. — Li-Young Lee

Aboard at a ship's helm
A young steersman steering with care.

Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,
An ocean-bell - O a warning bell, rock'd by the waves.

O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,
Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.

For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,
The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her grey sails,
The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds away gaily and safe.

But O ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship! Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging. — Walt Whitman

We suffer each other to have each other a while. — Li-Young Lee

It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India - a hundred Indias - whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly. — E. M. Forster

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

The beautiful thing
about young love
is the truth
in our hearts
that it will last forever. — Atticus Poetry

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability. — Oliver Sacks

I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art. — Harold Bloom

When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us. — Theresa Breslin

I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them. — Tracy K. Smith

Where the mind is without pain Where knowledge is gain; With you, life is not vain Where hate is a burden
Faith in humanity is not entwine The traces of you is me
I am you and you are me Where dreams are not met
Where the sun set and yet;
we still strive towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of democracy
has not lost its way into a struggling nation frozen snow of dead end;
The traces of you is found with in young soul that rise up with faith and knowing that positive activism is the way to create a just society. — Henry Johnson Jr

There are no humans left. I should not be alone. I can't help but wonder that. There were so many of us living. But time started growing young four years ago. It isn't four years anymore. It's a number I wouldn't even be able to say. It feels like four years. It's trapped in my tender memory as four years. It's been an age. Multiple ages. It's been lifetimes; every single lifetime that used to exist. I remember my mother screaming. I recall the doctors naming me as nurses wiped away her blood and covered her face with white. The end of the play. It's been so long. Why am I alone? — F.K. Preston

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass. — Wendell Berry

Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works. — Michael Leunig

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

I regard a love for poetry as one of the most needful and helpful elements in the life-outfit of a human being. It was the greatest of blessings to me, in the long days of toil to which I was shut in much earlier than most young girls are, that the poetry I held in my memory breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and around me, and touched even dull drudgery with its sunshine. — Lucy Larcom

Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature. — Ted Hughes

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

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's
Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower,
Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,
Where evil comes up softly like a flower.
Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,
Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;
But like an old sad faithful lecher, fain
To drink delight of that enormous trull
Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.
Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full,
Sodden with day, or, new appareled, stand
In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,
I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
The vulgar herd can never understand. — Charles Baudelaire

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

Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble. Young Gun ultrarunners were like Lost Generation writers in the '20s, Beat poets in the '50s, and rock musicians in the '60s: they were poor and ignored and free from all expectations and inhibitions. They were body artists, playing with the palette of human endurance. — Christopher McDougall

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

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

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

Beauty is startling. She wears a gold shawl in the summer and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. She is young and old at once, my daughter and my grandmother. In school she excelled in mathematics and poetry ... Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her. — J. Ruth Gendler

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

I Dwelt alone
In a world of moan,
And my soul was a stagnant tide,
Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride-
Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride
Ah, less-less bright
The stars of night
Than the eyes of the radiant girl!
And never a flake
That the vapor can make
With the moon-tints of purple and pearl,
Can vie with the modest Eulalie's most unregarded curl-
Can vie compare with the bright-eyed Eulalie's most humble and careless curl

Now Doubt-now Pain
Come never again,
For her soul gives me sigh for sigh,
And all day long
Shine, bright and strong,
Astarte within the sky,
While ever to her dear Eulalie upturns her matron eye-
While ever to her young Eulalie upturns her violet eye. — Edgar Allan Poe

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is. — John Steinbeck

It could be yesterday
when I was less in love
I think
For I didn't see you in the mirror
behind me
while getting dressed.
The way your hands couldn't stay away
and our bodies always found their ways back to each other
as if they were meant to be together
Close.

But then it was today and I saw you
again
in the mirror
behind me while getting dressed

So I go to sleep tonight
alone
without actually falling asleep because I'm scared of the moment I will wake up
and realise it was just a dream
You're actually gone.

Now all I can do is get through to another tomorrow
hoping that I will be less in love
again
Like yesterday

But not today.
I was never really well with things at all. — Charlotte Eriksson