Young Poets Quotes

He utilizes
form for a striking lecture;
young poets shiver

inexperience,
but thaw over their own work,
fertilize magic. ~ Kristen Henderson

Young poets are too apt to consider themselves "children of the mist" – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks to all hearts - and that instead of cherishing the sacred fire as a lonely light, as one that burns in a charnel house, they should bring it forth in its beauty and brightness as a guide to the pleasant places and sparkling waters of earth's happiness and the radiant messenger of heaven's exalted hopes. And they should rejoice and be glad that to them the kindling of such high imagination is given.

~ Sarah Josepha Hale
Ladies Magazine, November 1830

From the Introduction to Cherishing the Sacred Fire ~ Deborah L. Halliday

Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference. ~ Mason Cooley

She was one of those exceptional children who do still spend time outside, in solitude. In her case nature represented beauty - and refuge. "It's so peaceful out there and the air smells so good. I mean, it's polluted, but not as much as the city air. For me, it's completely different there," she said. "It's like you're free when you go out there. It's your own time. Sometimes I go there when I'm mad - and then, just with the peacefulness, I'm better. I can come back home happy, and my mom doesn't even know why."
The she described her special part of the woods.
"I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I'd dug a big hole there, and sometimes I'd take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lie down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I'd fall asleep back there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day."
The young poet's face flushed. Her voice thickened.
"And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me. ~ Richard Louv

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age. ~ Marguerite Young

Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here. ~ Philip Levine

She dances,
She dances around the burning flames with passion,
Under the same dull stars,
Under the same hell with crimson embers crashing,
Under the same silver chains that wires,
All her beauty and who she is inside,
She's left with the loneliness of human existence,
She's left questioning how she's survived,
She's left with this awakening of brutal resilience,
Her true beauty that she denies,
As much she's like to deny it,
As much as it continues to shine,
That she doesn't even have to admit,
Because we all know it's true,
Her glory and success,
After all she's been through,
Her triumph and madness,
AND YET,
SHE STANDS.

Broken legs- but she's still standing,
Still dancing in this void,
You must wonder how she's still dancing,
You must wonder how she's not destroyed,
She doesn't even begin to drown within the flames,
But little do you realize,
Within these chains,
She weeps and she cries,
But she still goes on,
And just you thought you could stop her?
You thought you'd be the one?
Well, let me tell you, because you thought wrong.
Nothing will ever silence her,
Because I KNOW,
I know that she is admiringly strong,
Her undeniable beauty,
The triumph of her song,
She's shining bright like a ruby,
Reflecting in the golden sand,
She's shining brighter like no other,
She's far more ~ Gabrielle Renee

I write poems. I'm often laughed at for doing so. My friends and foes, who were born in 1980's or even later aren't savvy with this concept of the reading and writing poems. They're probably not at fault because while they were being brought up in their respective environments, they weren't really taught how to appreciate poetry. Sadly, those same indifferent souls are now raising their children in the same robotic way, keeping them away from an art form as pure as poetry. Anyway, on the path my life, my poems, written and unwritten, are spread throughout like breadcrumbs. Alas! I'm savouring these breadcrumbs alone because no one has chosen to walk by me, maybe because they're skeptic about the taste of these crumbs. They've hypothetically assumed that these crumbs, these poems are bitter. Sigh! They aren't courageous enough to gather the strength to actually taste them. Perhaps this way, the real sweetness of my crumbs, of my poems stays obscured to them. But I haven't let them crush this sweetness beneath their feet and that's why, I've chosen to walk alone instead. How can I not savour these crumbs if I already know that they're leading me to the apex of my life? How can I not write poems if a voice inside me is constantly pecking my hands to give it a form? This voice is my meditation. This voice is my shadow, a shadow which is stubborn enough to remain intact even when I'll be gone. This voice is my concrete, the concrete that I'm made up of. This voice is my power, the ~ Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal

Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast. ~ Archibald MacLeish

I was well acquainted with the Calcutta literary circle since I was 17, when I lived in Bangladesh and published and edited a little magazine called 'Sejuti,' for which young poets from both Bengals wrote. If you look at my life, there is no question of using anyone for anything. I have only got banned, blacklisted and banished. ~ Taslima Nasrin

I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere back in Baltimore. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watching six-year-olds learn to surf, or at colleges listening to sophomores slip from English to Italian, or at cafés seeing young poets flip though "The Waste Land," or listening to the radio where economists explain economic things that I could've explored in my lost years, mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, have not yet run out of time, though I know that we all run out of time, and some of us run out of it faster. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Yes, it is wonderful to be alive! Indeed, the Bottle inwardly sang of all this, as do young poets, who frequently also know nothing about the things of which they sing. From The Bottle Neck ~ Hans Christian Andersen

A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it. ~ Amber Tamblyn

It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls. ~ Bohumil Hrabal

The promising young poets, the hopefuls? I'd name Richard Wilbur, Peter Viereck, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ciardi...Leonard Bacon...but it is still too early to assertions. They're all 'in the field.' It remains to be seen how many will cross the finish line. ~ Robert Frost

Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you'll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you're able. ~ Philip Levine

Joss laughed and looked up into Braden's face. 'Apparently the dress is good.'

'I'm getting that,' he murmured. 'Still, I'm more looking forward to taking it off you than anything else that day.'

'Braden,' Ellie bemoaned, 'not in front of me.'

'Stop kissing Adam in front of me and I'll stop making sexual comments to my wife in front of you.'

'She's not your wife yet,' Nate reminded him. 'No need to rush it.'

I snorted. 'Nate, your commitment phobia is showing again.'

He turned to me in mock horror. 'Where?' He patted his cheeks anxiously. 'Get it off me.'

Brushing my thumb across an imaginary speck on his cheekbone, I reassured him. 'There it is. All gone.'

'Phew.' He took a swig of his lager and looked toward the bar. 'I'll never get laid with that thing on show.'

'Charming,' I murmured. ~ Samantha Young

JACK
That is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury.
ALGERNON
Then your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.
JACK
That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.
ALGERNON
Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time. ~ Oscar Wilde

To keep on trying in spite of disappointment and failure is the only way to keep young and brave. Failures become victories if they make us wise-hearted. ~ Helen Keller

We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies? ~ Edward Young

Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?"
"The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret ~ Betty Smith

She had streaked blonde hair, long and straight, parted in the middle framing high cheek bones, an aquiline nose and beautiful deep blue eyes. She was young, around 30, tall and lithe with a good body, athletic, not skinny. She wore a sleeveless black dress that exposed her toned arms and shoulders, indicating regular workouts or yoga. There was a hint of vein running the length of her lean muscle. This girl stood out like an arabian in a corral full of draft horses. ~ Nick Hahn

Life teaches us two important things - we are careless when we are young and by the time we get old, it is too late to be careful!! ~ Uma Shanker

It's a real pleasure to go to work when you're in the most extraordinary surroundings, and working with people who are young and interested and creatively keen. ~ Hugo Weaving

When you're a movie star and you're young, you are always playing someone who's a better fighter, a better lover, a better everything than you. ~ Michael Caine

I think making mistakes is as inevitable as receiving disappointments. ~ Loretta Young

In some ways the experience of these young men paralleled the experience of the very old. They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who'd been there. ~ Pat Barker

I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn't know. ~ Ishmael Beah

We have shown that social enjoyment and amusements are not incompatible with correct conduct and true religion. Instead of forbidding the theatre and placing it under ban, it has been the aim of the Latter-day Saints to control it and keep it free from impure influences, and to preserve it as a place where all could meet for the purpose of healthful enjoyment. Our leading men have, therefore, gone to these places with the view, by their presence, of restraining all practices and influences that would be injurious to the young and rising generation. Too great care cannot be exercised that liberty shall not degenerate into license, and not to convert that which should furnish enjoyment and simple pleasure into a means of producing unhealthful excitement or corrupting morals.

Our social parties should be conducted in a manner to give gratification to all who attend them, however delicate and refined they may be in their feelings. Rude and boisterous conduct and everything of an improper character should be forbidden at such assemblages. . . . Committee-men and officers in charge of parties should see that dances of every kind are conducted in a modest and becoming manner, and that no behavior be permitted that would lead to evil or that would offend the most delicate susceptibilities. ~ John Taylor

By the 'best minds' Ginsberg meant the dropouts, poets, musicians and world travellers, as opposed to doctors and lawyers. He understood that Wrong Planet people tend to pick up better communication skills, have greater visualisation, and can adapt to changing circumstances quicker than Rag, Tag & Bobtail. ~ Karl Wiggins

You will practice more self-awareness. People who meditate regularly, overtime they develop a greater awareness of themselves, their actions and emotions. ~ Amy Young

In short, by the institution of childhood I mean all those attitudes and feelings, and also customs and laws, that put a great gulf or barrier between the young and their elders, and the world of their elders; that make it difficult or impossible for young people to make contact with the larger society around them, and, even more, to play any kind of active, responsible, useful part in it; that lock the young into eighteen years or more of subserviency and dependency, and make of them, as I said before, a mixture of expensive nuisance, fragile treasure, slave, and super-pet. ~ John Holt

I'm a very introverted guy, so I don't need to be around people for as long as someone who's very extroverted to get that sort of social fix per se. ~ Adam Young

If you educate a man you educate a person, but if you educate a woman you educate a family ~ Brigham Young

The contrast between the realization of his neglect and the fondness I had for my father was painful. ~ Yangsze Choo

Sometimes, in life, you always want to have what you can't have. At times, you feel that relationships aren't your top priority so you get distracted with other things. Some feel that they are too young to settle down, so they hop from person to person to person. They are the most confused souls on the earth, they are unsure about themselves. ~ Jyoti Patel

The letters I really love are from young actresses who were worried they had to fit a certain look. They say I've opened it up. And I don't just mean plus-size girls. You can push things now. With all the great performances in 'Bridesmaids', it changed how people see funny women. ~ Melissa McCarthy

Young people like, and even love, on impulse. ~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Touring the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, astute observer of the young Republic, noted the "feverish ardor" of its citizens to accumulate. Yet, even as the typical American "clutches at everything," the Frenchman wrote, "he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications." However munificent his possessions, the American hungered for more, an obsession that filled him with "anxiety, fear, and regret, and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation."2 ~ Andrew J. Bacevich

That summer, there was a Name the Babies contest, an annual event organized by the Whale Museum on San Juan Island. A young girl from Bellingham submitted the winning entry. The little orca should be named "Luna", she wrote, because "the whale explores the ocean like the moon explores the Earth. ~ Michael Parfit

New York city wasn't yet the post-Giuliani, Bloomberg forever, Disneyland tourist attraction of today, trade-marked and policed to protect the visitors and tourism industry. It was still a place of diversity, where people lived their lives in vibrant communities and intact cultures. Young people could still move to New York City after or instead of high school or college and invent an identity, an art, a life. Times Square was still a bustling center of excitement, with sex work, "adult" movies, a variety of sins on sale, ways to make money for those down on their luck". ~ B. Ruby Rich

It's like a jolt of electric, but worse. ~ Lee Davidson

I'm just an innocent racist who likes to flirt with young adult women And I meet emotionally retarded misfits who are kinky about infants' feet, scheming psychopaths, suicidal emos, brain dead skinheads and mestizos posing as white supremacists. ~ Greg Deane

The mind is the enemy of intuition, according to many New Age adherents, but I don't buy that. I look at everything in terms of polarities - two ends of the same continuum. Young/old, male/female, individuality/conformity, work/play, freedom/constraint, right/left, day/night, life/death, rational/emotional, and so on. ~ Shakti Gawain

The child inside of you knows how to take things as they come, how to deal most effectively and happily with everything and everyone it encounters on this planet. If you can recapture that childlike essence of your being, you can stay 'forever young at heart.' ~ Wayne Dyer

My days are filled with you, and for that I am more grateful than you could ever know ~ Kennedy Vega

While we can't turn off the aging gene, we do go to a lot of extremes to stay young, I've noticed. ~ Andrew Niccol

Clearly a woman of good taste, she was reading a historical romance. I loved historical romances. And contemporary romances. And paranormal romances. And young adult romances. Pretty much anything in front of the word romance would do it for me. ~ Darynda Jones

I am exactly where I need to be - and that is in a better place mentally and physically. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

What did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. ~ Jack Kerouac

Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans
neither fearing the loss of the other. ~ Dave Eggers

Nothing is rarer than a solitary lie; for lies breed like Surinam toads; you cannot tell one but out it comes with a hundred young ones on its back. ~ Washington Allston

I learned early on that love was treacherous, leaving my heart like an open wound for others to infect. ~ Maggie Young

I detest farewells and feel that parting, as some foreign poets say, is "dying a little." I do not like to meet death, however easy it may be, nor do I like to be aware of it, to await it, or to fear it. I prefer for it to take me by complete surprise, that it should snatch me away suddenly, that I should exit life as inadvertently as I entered it. ~ Taha Hussein

The importance of reviewing is apparent and proven. However, the majority of people do not do it in their own lives. Do you want to live your best life now? Take deliberate action and begin to REVIEW where you have been, where you are now, and where you would like to be. ~ Susan C. Young