Poetry Quotes by Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the…

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.

— Carl Sandburg

I'll die propped up in bed trying to do a poem about America.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'

— Carl Sandburg

I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors,…

— Carl Sandburg

“Under the summer roses When the flagrant crimson Lurks in the dusk Of the wild red leaves, Love, with little hands, Comes…

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.

— Carl Sandburg

“When the rose’s flash to the sunset Reels to the wrack and the twist, And the rose is a red bygone, When…

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

— Carl Sandburg

“I cannot tell you now; When the wind's drive and whirl Blow me along no longer, And the wind's a whisper at…

— Carl Sandburg

“Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-haired child.”

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

— Carl Sandburg

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet…

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

— Carl Sandburg

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

— Carl Sandburg