Poetry Quotes by Carl Sandburg

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

— 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

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

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

— 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

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

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

— Carl Sandburg

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

— 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 statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only…

— 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

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off.…

— Carl Sandburg

There is a formal poetry perfect only in form?the number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if…

— Carl Sandburg

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

— 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 type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear…

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.

— Carl Sandburg

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

— Carl Sandburg

The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.

— 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 any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

— Carl Sandburg