Poets From The United States

"It has been often remarked that earnest men excel in humor, and we perceive how benign is the law which thus tempers elements of fearful intensity."

"This miserable habit of our times is vividly illustrated by the manner in which those next most sacred things to mortals, books, are treated."

"There is to the poetical sense a ravishing prophecy and winsome intimation in flowers that now and then, from the influence of mood of circumstance, reasserts itself like the reminiscence of childhood, or the spell of love."

"Society is too often at war with love. Thousands of human spirits created to assimilate, to afford mutual comfort and inspiration, to interpret each other, and find in sympathy a balm and motive that will render them superior to vicissitude; thousands of human spirits cross and recross each other's paths, severed by the barriers of vain custom and arbitrary opinion."

"There are no greater forgers in the universe, than cunning mannerists. Their whole lives are false. The loveliest of human attributes, the beautiful, the winning virtue of sincerity, abides not with them. They have abjured the profession of humanity."

"We discern beyond the smile and the honeyed word, and are sickened at the self-created hollowness of a human heart."

"Fashion seldom interferes with nature without diminishing her grace and efficiency."

"The soul, by an instinct stronger than reason, ever associates beauty with truth."

"A popular epithet usually goes nearer the truth than we are apt to imagine."

"It is to be regretted we are so limited in costume. No word is more prevalent than becoming, and no idea more commonly violated. As regards the dress of our own sex, I do not remember to have met a single exception to the feeling of its almost entire deficiency, both in elegance and adaptation."

"If the perspective of time were not a necessary condition of romance, the present age would be deemed as fertile in the wonderful as any which have preceded it; but this obvious truth, though sometimes acknowledged, is seldom realized."

"Society is the offspring of leisure; and to acquire this forms the only rational motive for accumulating wealth, notwithstanding the cant that prevails on the subject of labor."

"One reason why the most famous portraits of the old masters, ... are so life-like, and inspire so deep a sense of their authenticity, is doubtless that the originals were objects of affection, and familiar by constant association and sympathy, to the minds of the artists."

"It has been said that self-respect is the gate of heaven, and the most cursory observation shows that a degree of reserve adds vastly to the latent force of character."

"When the fluid particles composing the primeval earth settled into consistent masses, an unbroken, uniform plain was not the result; but everywhere, form, color, and density indicated the various species of matter. Verdure crept over the rich loam, long tables of sand marked the limits of the sea, and rocks of every hue stood forth from the hills. Form of aspect and movement became a law of creation. Even the unstable elements obeyed it."

"Whatever is genuine in social relations endures, despite of time, error, absence, and destiny; and that which has no inherent vitality had better die at once. A great poet has truly declared that constancy is no virtue, but a fact."

"There they breathe a congenial atmosphere. Often subsisting upon the merest pittance, indulging in every vagary of costume, they wander over the land and yield themselves freely to the spirit of adventure and the luxury of art."

"If Love were jester at the court of Death, And Death the king of all, still would I pray "For me the motley and the bauble, yea, Though all be vanity as the Preacher saith, The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath!""

"Why linger o'er decrepit shrine In Hellas or in Palestine? America as Greece is grand, America is Holy Land."

"The Night walked down the sky With the moon in her hand."

"I find no foeman in the road but Fear — To doubt is failure, and to dare, success!"

"The war's red flames, Charging Tarleton, proud Cornwallis, navies moving on the James."

"Reads again the words puissant, "All men are created free," Claims again for man his birthright, claims the world's equality."

"Evening in majestic shadows fell upon the fortress' walls: Sweetly were the last bells ringing on the James and on the Charles. 'Mid the choruses of freedom two departed victors lay, One beside the blue Rivanna, one by Massachusetts Bay. He was gone, and night her sable curtain drew across the sky; Gone his soul into all nations, gone to live and not to die."

"Like an isle rose Monticello through the cooled and rippling trees, Like an isle in rippling starlight in the silence of the seas. Ceased the mocking-bird his singing; said the slaves with faltering breath, "'Tis the Third, and on the morrow Heaven will send the Angel Death.""

"One taper lights a thousand, Yet shines as it has shone; And the humblest light may kindle A brighter than its own. Between a man of peace and war."

"In the past his soul is living as in fifty years ago, Hastes again to Philadelphia, hears again the Schuylkill flow — Meets again the elder Adams — knowing not that far away He is waiting for Death's morrow, on old Massachusetts Bay; Meets with Hancock, young and courtly, meets with Hopkins, bent and old, Meets again calm Roger Sherman, fiery Lee, and Carroll bold, Meets the sturdy form of Franklin, meets the half a hundred men Who have made themselves immortal, — breathes the ancient morn again."

""An empire to be lost or won!" And who four thousand miles will ride And climb to heaven the Great Divide, And find the way to Washington, Through mountain cañons, winter snows, O'er streams where free the north wind blows, Who, who will ride from Walla-Walla, Four thousand miles, for Oregon?"

"The voice of the Russias has spoken; Each serf in the Russias is free! Ring, bells, on the Neva and Volga, Ring, bells, on the Caspian Sea!"

"The with rapture behold, Overshadow our realm with his plumage of gold! The flood-gates of glory are open on high, And Warren and Mercer descend from the sky! They come from above With a message of love, To bid us be firm and decided; "For you conquer, unless you're divided. Unite, and the foes to your freedom defy, Till the continent sinks, and the ocean is dry!""

"Methinks when I stand in life's sunset, As I stood when we parted at school, I shall see the bright faces of children I loved in the village of Yule."

"Ye sons of Columbia, unite in the cause Of liberty, justice, religion, and laws."

"Should Buonapart' come with his sans culotte band, And a new sort of freedom we don't understand, And make us an offer to give us as much As France has bestow'd on the Swiss and the Dutch, His fraud and his force Will be futile of course; We wish for no Frenchified Freedom."

"Lovely land of Palestina! he thy shores will never see, But, his dream fulfilled, he follows Him who walked in Galilee."

"It is natural to speak of hymns as "poems," indiscriminately, for they have the same structure. But a hymn is not necessarily a poem, while a poem that can be sung as a hymn is something more than a poem. Imagination makes poems; devotion makes hymns. There can be poetry without emotion, but a hymn never. A poem may argue; a hymn must not. In short to be a hymn, what is written must express spiritual feelings and desires. The music of faith, hope and charity will be somewhere in its strain."

"I healed the wound, and each morning It sang its old sweet strain, But the bird with the broken pinion Never soars so high again."

"Where, where is the long, flowing hair, The velvet suit, the broad bow tie; Where is the other-worldly air, Where the abstracted eye?"

"The sleek, expensive girls I teach, Younger and pinker every year, Bloom gradually out of reach."

"I haven't read one book about A book or memorized one plot. Or found a mind I did not doubt. I learned one date. And then forgot. And one by one the solid scholars Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars."

"—All this Dark Age machinery On which we had tormented you To life."

"Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama; Aged in wrong, the empires are declining, And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence. What shall I say to the young on such a morning?— Mind is the one salvation?—also grammar?— No; my little ones lean not toward revolt."

"They wear their godhead lightly. They look out from their hill and say, To themselves, "We have nowhere to go but down; The great destination is to stay.""

"I taught myself to name my name, To bark back, loosen love and crying; To ease my woman so she came, To ease an old man who was dying."

"You still whispered you would not die. Yet the nights I heard you cry Like a whipped child;"

"I don't think about my writing as being about fame. I think of it in a communal context. Yet it's naive and apolitical to deny that elements of privilege accrue to visibility. Certainly, a visibly lesbian artist is doing something that many lesbians can't do in their own work lives. That visibility is the result of community building, of something that is given to the lesbian artist from the lesbian community. When I think about these issues, it seems all the more reason to be scrupulous about how to return things to the community and to place my life in perspective. I've worked hard, but I certainly could not be doing this by myself. The other thing I know about power is what I've learned from Audre Lorde, who said that if we don't use our power, it will be turned against us. I think there is an important distinction between power over and power with. I'm interested in how we develop power with others. I think it's important that my having access to my own power in my writing doesn't mean draining it away from the community or using it in opposition to others but, rather, using my power collectively with others to build a transformative future."

"I wrote that poem ["All the Women Caught in Flaring Light"] because, at the time I was writing the book [Crime Against Nature], I would read at women's cultural spaces and lesbians would come up and tell me heartrending stories. I felt a responsibility to tell some of them. I guess it's what happens when you're a writer in a culture of repressed groups...I think the concept of writing or art as just self-expression or self-fulfillment is a Eurocentric and sterile patriarchal idea...Because it goes only one way. And it's not a way of conceiving of art that acknowledges that you are able to make art only because things come to you from your community. The image of the individualistic, egocentric artist-white, male, and heterosexual-is premised on him creating all by himself in defiance of his culture. But that's not how I have made my art, nor is it how most people in repressed cultures create. You make art only in the matrix of your community and you're pretty foolish if you don't think that that's true. Responsibility isn't a grim thing, you know, in that context. It's just what's real You are fed, and you feed."

"I have not learned how often I Can win, can love, but choose to die."

"It was the nature of the thing: No moon outlives its leaving night, No sun its day. And I went on Rich in the loss of all I sing To the threshold of waking light, To larksong and the live, gray dawn. So night by night, my life has gone."

"Up the reputable walks of old established trees They stalk, children of the nouveaux riches; chimes Of the tall Clock Tower drench their heads in blessing."

"It's important to deal directly with lesbian issues, whether or not one does that as an open lesbian teacher. It's important not to just shove lesbian issues to one side but to deal with them head on in the classroom, especially if one is teaching women's studies. The controversy right now is over a woman teacher bringing lesbian issues into the classroom. In another era you couldn't be a married woman and teach. It really is about what's acceptable to do as a woman occupying a position in an educational system that's supposed to be a replication of heterosexuality. Before you even start talking about what books you're going to use, you have to be ready to address that root premise."