"&emsp;I have been sojourning late Among the pleasant places of my Past, The green and quiet neighborhoods of Thought, In which I wandered in my wayward youth; With no companion but the constant Muse, Who sought me when I needed her—ah when Did I not need her, solitary else?"

"There are gains for all our losses, There are balms for all our pain: But when youth, the dream, departs, It takes something from our hearts, And it never comes again."

"We love in others what we lack ourselves, And would be every thing but what we are."

"A voice of greeting from the wind was sent, The mists enfolded me with soft white arms, The birds did sing to lap me in content, The rivers wove their charms, And every little daisy in the grass Did look into my face and smile to see me pass."

"Pale in her fading bowers the Summer stands, Like a new Niobe with claspèd hands, Silent above the flowers, her children lost, Slain by the arrows of the early frost."

"Silence is the speech of love, The music of the spheres above."

"Once when the days were ages, And the old Earth was young, The high gods and the sages From Nature's golden pages Her open secrets wrung. Each questioned each to know Whence came the Heavens above, and whence the Earth below."

"There is no death—the thing that we call death Is but another, sadder name for life, Which is itself an insufficient name, Faint recognition of that unknown Life— That Power whose shadow is the Universe."

"We have two lives about us, Two worlds in which we dwell; Within us, and without us, Alternate Heaven and Hell: Without, the somber Real, Within our hearts of hearts, the beautiful Ideal!"

"Most joyful let the Poet be; It is through him that all men see."

"I sing New England, as she lights her fire In every Prairie's midst; and where the bright Enchanting stars shine pure through Southern night, She still is there, the guardian on the tower, To open for the world a purer hour."

"Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict."

"I laugh, for hope hath happy place with me; If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea."

"My highway is unfeatured air, My consorts are the sleepless stars, And men my giant arms upbear — My arms unstained and free from scars."

"A wail in the wind is all I hear; A voice of woe for a lover's loss."

"Gay, guiltless pair, What seek ye from the fields of heaven? Ye have no need of prayer, Ye have no sins to be forgiven."

"Behold! in Liberty’s unclouded blaze We lift our heads, a race of other days."

"Yes, social friend, I love thee well, In learned doctors’ spite; Thy clouds all other clouds dispel, And lap me in delight."

"Lo where the stage, the poor, degraded stage, Holds its warped mirror to a gaping age."

"Through life’s dark road his sordid way he wends, An incarnation of fat dividends."

"Mr. Sandburg possesses a powerful imagination, which plays over and about his realistic themes and constantly ennobles them. ...strikes, and factories, and slaughter-houses, and railroad trains, all take on a lyric quality under his touch. ...When Carl Sandburg left college, he was no longer an unskilled labourer, working with his hands. He was a thinking man, with a brain charged with ideas and emotions, determined to do his part in bringing about the millennium. For Carl Sandburg... is a revolutionary; he must push the world to where he is convinced it ought to be. ...again and again, he deserts the seer's mountain peak for the demagogue's soap-box. ...Mr. Sandburg is like a man striving to batter down a jail with balls of brightly coloured glass. ...Whether constant preoccupation with disease is a healthy form of literature, whether it acts as a curative, is open to question. But we can surely say that to be curative the disease must be treated unsentimentally and truly. Mr. Sandburg has aimed at doing this, has striven hard to do it. For this, one honours him above his fellows. For this, and the spirit of beauty which pervades his work."

"Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart."

"[the story] "Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds" is a tribute to Amy Lowell, I've done a lot of what you might call metaliterature; that is, literature that's saying, "Isn't Amy Lowell wonderful? This is sort of like what she did." (Q: Lowell's underrated now, isn't she?) A: She was a wonderful narrative poet, but narrative verse is totally out of fashion now. I think it was one of her reactions to being a woman and a lesbian. An outsider has to write outsider verse. She's one of those people who wrote so prolifically that a lot of it is not good, but some of it is absolutely superb. She has a collection that attracted me called Down East, which is poems in New England dialect, and she has written stories of the supernatural in verse that I absolutely love."

"To understand Vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader."

"Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance."

"It would be pleasant to be drunk: faithless to my tongue and hands, giving up the boundaries for the heroic gin. Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool. I will try it shortly."

"A woman who writes feels too much, those trances and portents! As if cycles and children and islands weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough. She thinks she can warm the stars. A writer is essentially a spy. Dear love, I am that girl."

"And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone."

"Need is not quite belief."

"Fact: death too is in the egg. Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat. And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet."

"Dearest, although everything has happened, nothing has happened."

"In a dream you are never eighty."

"I imitate a memory of belief that I do not own."

"I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray."

"I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind."

"Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane."

"We are all writing God's poem."

"Love your self's self where it lives. There is no special God to refer to; or if there is, why did I let you grow in another place. You did not know my voice when I came back to call. All the superlatives of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe will not help you know the holidays you had to miss."

"All who love have lied."

"I was spread out daily and examined for flaws."

"I grow old on my bitterness."

"Earth, earth riding your merry-go-round toward extinction, right to the roots thickening the oceans like gravy, festering in your caves, you are becoming a latrine."

"We all walk softly away. We would stay and be the nurse but there are too many of us and we are too worried to help. It is love that walks away and yet we have terrible mouths and soft milk hands. We worry with like. We walk away like love."