Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.

Gather the stars if you wish it soGather the songs and keep them.Gather the faces of women.Gather for keeping years and years.And then...Loosen your hands, let go and say good-bye.Let the stars and songs go.Let the faces and years go.Loosen your hands and say good-bye.

There are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

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

Under the summer rosesWhen the flagrant crimsonLurks in the duskOf the wild red leaves,Love, with little hands, Comes and touches youWith a thousand memories,And asks youBeautiful, unanswerable questions.

Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one another's throats for room to stand and among them all are not two thumbs alike.

I told her I felt kind of restless about the new poetry and I had high hopes the new poetry one way or another would be able to get at the real stuff of American life, slipping its fingers into the steel meshes and copper coils of it under the streets and over the houses and people and factories and groceries, conceding a fair batting average to Dante and Keats for what they wrote about love and roses and the moon.

I speak of new cities and new peopleI tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,a sun dropped in the west.I tell you there is nothing in the worldonly an ocean of tomorrows.a sky of tomorrows.I am a brother of the cornhuskers who sayat sundown:Tomorrow is a day.”- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers