20th century Quote by Leslie Fiedler

Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think…

— Derek Walcott

You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at…

— Robert Hass

I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make…

— P. G. Wodehouse

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by…

— Robert Morgan

What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.

— James Fenton

I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that…

— Pat Conroy

I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets.

— Tom Hodgkinson

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

— Helen Vendler

Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from…

— Guy Davenport

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in…

— Sarah Vowell

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.

— Carol Ann Duffy

More modern poetry is written than read.

— P. J. O'Rourke