I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry — all of the…

Sometimes you get lit students that know a lot about the canon but virtually nothing about contemporary poetry and vice versa. I like to…

— Elaine Equi

There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that ,…

— W. H. Auden

“These empty pages are your future, soon to become your past. T will read the most personal tale you shall ever find in a…

— Anonymous

I love the past. I read about the past all the time.

— Tiny Tim

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of…

— Octavio Paz

The social revolution...cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself…

— Karl Marx

Hello my Country I once came to tell everyone your story Your passion was my poetry And your past my most potent glory Your…

— Harry Chapin

For poetry, he's past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme; His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk,…

— Jonathan Swift

I'm reading a manuscript by Rodney Jones, "Village Prodigies",it's one of the best contemporary poetry books I've ever read ever.

— Stephen Dobyns

Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but…

— Roland Barthes

If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really…

— Ted Kooser

I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing…

— Etel Adnan

There is no access to contemporary poetry in the libraries.

— Kwame Dawes

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures…

— Ben Lerner

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

— W. H. Auden