Existential Poetry Quotes

In vain I try to jump into the photo
To create again a time so simple
That a piece of paper might encapsulate it
From the erosive winds and waves of time
Which bring even the greatest of loves to a grave of dust. ~ Justin Wetch

Every year I manage to live on this earth I collect more questions than answers. ~ Fatimah Asghar

for we all have
our own

twilights
and mists
and abysses

to return to. ~ Sanober Khan

I, I'll type. And that will be enough.
Then there are the other days, when nothing is enough. The poem grins. It grins because it knows it is a terrible poem. It grins in embarrassment. It grins in pity. It grins in superiority. I may be a terrible poem, it grins, but at least I have one comfort. At least I'm not a terrible poet. At least I'm not the guy who sat in front of a typewriter for two hours coming up with the likes of me. ~ Lynn Coady

Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview. ~ Marlon James

Poetry can magnify experience. ~ May Swenson

I realized Michael was right. I mean, I am always writing in this journal. And I do compose a lot of poetry, and write a lot of notes and emails and stuff. I mean, I feel like I am always writing. I do it so much, I never even thought about it as a talent. It's just something I do all the time, like breathing. ~ Meg Cabot

GDP doesn't register, as Robert Kennedy put it, "the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate." GDP measures everything, Kennedy concluded, "except that which makes life worthwhile." Nor does GDP take into account unpaid work, the so-called compassionate economy. ~ Eric Weiner

I wish to put together an imaginary nation. It is my belief that no other nation is possible, or rather, I believe that authors who count take responsibility for a map which is addressed to travellers of the earth, the world, and the spirit. Each issue is composed as a map of this land and this glory, images of our cities and of our politics must join our poetry. I want a nation in which discourse is active and scholarship is understood as it should be, the mode of our understanding and the ground of our derivations.
-Robin Blaser (June 3, 1967) ~ Robin Blaser

All I ask the haters
and I, too, am one
is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love. ~ Ben Lerner

Her echo is the only reality in his silence. ~ Gwen Calvo

Don't play with fire if you can't handle the flame. ~ Wilder Poetry

Though fervent was our vow,
Though ruddily ran our pleasure,
Bliss has fulfilled its measure,
And sees its sentence now.
Ache deep; but make no moans:
Smile out; but stilly suffer:
The paths of love are rougher
Than thoroughfares of stones. ~ Thomas Hardy

In this crooked blind alley, as the chill descends,
they feed fires
with logs of song and poetry.
Hazard not a thought:
These are strange times, my dear.

The man who knocks at your door in the noon of the night
has come to kill the light.
Let's hide light in the larder. ~ Ahmad Shamlu

Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point. ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

I'm kissing you now - across
The gap of a thousand years. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves. ~ Jack Prelutsky

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears. ~ Lord Alfred Douglas

His relentless lust
Failed to accept the demands of love,
He got back his senses
And responded to her
But, just too lately! ~ Jyoti Patel

What do you think of when you think of mourning?' Jenny asks.
The question snaps me back to attention. I answer without really thinking. "I guess 'Funeral Blues' by W.H. Auden. I think it was Auden. I suppose that's not very original.'
'I don't know it.'
'It's a poem.'
'I gathered.'
'I'm just clarifying. It's not a blues album.'
Jenny ignores my swipe at her intelligence.
'Does your response need to be original? Isn't that what poetry is for, for the poet to express something so personal that it ultimately is universal?'
I shrug. Who is Jenny, even new Jenny, to say what poetry is for? Who am I for that matter?
'Why do you thin of that poem in particular?'
"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, / Silence the pianos and with muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.'
I learned the poem in college and it stuck. ~ Steven Rowley

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods. ~ Salman Rushdie

crawled like a blind slug into the
web ~ Charles Bukowski

A human life is poetry written in our heart. ~ Debasish Mridha

A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Colliding with the bright light
Of my true self,
My illusions scream loudly,
Themselves illusions
Created by other illusions,
Finally knowing that
Deep within me
Beneath the shell
Lies the sacred beauty
Of my true self. ~ Ilchi Lee

I think a lot of America turned to art and culture after Sept. 11. I know the sales of bibles went shooting up, but so did the sales of poetry. I think in a crisis one looks to one's culture, partially to give validation to why one would want that culture to survive. ~ Art Spiegelman

The senses give both us and the animals access to the natural world, but we humans have superimposed a second world by internalizing a poem, thereby making the two worlds seem equally inescapable. Outside of the natural sciences, reason works within the second world, following paths that the imagination has cleared. But inside those sciences, nature itself shows the way, ~ Richard M. Rorty

She was one of those most beautiful poetries that I had written with all the love in my heart but never allowed the world to know about it. ~ Akshay Vasu

Poetry is the image of man and nature ~ William Wordsworth

Our goodnight spooning
became goodbye turning away
from one another,
the farther we could,
to the edges of the same bed. ~ Tatjana Ostojic

LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it. ~ Mina Loy

Erotic literarature is literature in which eroticism is the novel. It focuses on that. It also implies a certain degree of description, a certain hard core. And to find novels in which you have plot, character, literary quality, plus detailed and real moving descriptions of fucking is a rarity.


There is a vibration which takes place in the erotic realm, which translating it into something else, demeans it and destroys it. You need real poetry to talk about that sort of thing. ~ Marco Vassi

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. ~ Jacques Maritain

Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful. As pictures and statues, and living beauty, too, show better by music-light, so is poetry irradiated, vivified, glorified', and raised into immortal life by harmony. ~ Walter Savage Landor

When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly. ~ Daniel Woodrell

There is no poetic art like praying. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented. ~ Mark Strand

it is natural to want to employ your friends when you find yourself in times of need. The world is a harsh place, and your friends soften the harshness. Besides, you know them. Why depend on a stranger when you have a friend at hand?

The problem is that you often do not know your friends as well as you imagine. Friends often agree on things in order to avoid an argument. They cover up their unpleasant qualities so as not offend each other. They laugh extra hard at each others jokes. Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels. Friends will say they love your poetry, adore your music, envy your taste in clothes - maybe they mean, often they do not. ~ Robert Greene

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

All these thoughts of love and strife
Glimmered through his lurid life,
As the stars' intenser light
Through the red flames o'er him trailing,
As his ships went sailing, sailing,
Northward in the summer night. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow